Auto-select options

[marty66234]

Hi.

When using the Move tool (V)

1. When I move my mouse over objects such as text boxes and shapes, it doesn't highlight them. Is there an option to highlight them? (similar to illustrator)

2. Can I disable selecting text unless I click the actual text? Currently it's being selected if I click the text box. Again, illustrator won't select the text unless I select the actual text.

 

1 would really help but 2 would be an additional help.

Thanks.

[thomaso]

Hi @marty66234, Welcome to the Affinity Forums!

1. No, unfortunately there is no such auto-highlight-when-hovering feature for a moving cursor only.
[There is an auto-highlight option in the Snapping settings (-> "candidates") but this requires an object being moved around.]

2. It depends on your currently selected tool:

• With Move Tool and Node Tool you select a text frame without the ability to select characters.
• If you double-click with Move Tool on a text frame it switches to the Text Tool, which, of course, can select characters.
• Then you can use the shortcut 'V' to toggle between Text and Move Tool. [This feature works with all recently selected pairs of tools.]

[marty66234]

I asked about 2 because it selects the text box when I only want to select the text box if I click the actual text.

This is how it works in illustrator - if only selects the text if I actually click the tet, rather than the box it is in. It really helps when you have a lot of text on the screen and you don't want to select the wrong one.

[thomaso]

37 minutes ago, marty66234 said:

I asked about 2 because it selects the text box when I only want to select the text box if I click the actual text.

What "it" do you mean? What tool and what action do you use to select?

• A text frame is not selected until you click on it.
• Selecting a text frame does not select "actual text."
• To select text, you must click-drag or multiple click within a text frame.
• You also have the option of moving a text frame using the Text tool: hover over the text frame's bounding box to get the four-arrow cursor, then click and drag to move the object.
  
  

[marty66234]

if a text frame is huge, but only 1 word in there (example "WRITING") , it will select the text box if I select anywhere in the text box.

Illustrator, instead, will only select the text box when the user selects "WRITING". 

[thomaso]

2 minutes ago, marty66234 said:

if a text frame is huge, but only 1 word in there (example "WRITING") , it will select the text box if I select anywhere in the text box.

Illustrator, instead, will only select the text box when the user selects "WRITING". 

Again, who/what tool is "it" and how do you "select"? Does "select" mean 'click' or 'double-click' or 'click-drag', …?
('click' means mouse button down + up, while 'click-drag' means mouse button down + mouse move)

In Affinity, if you do not click then nothing will get selected. If you do click you will have a reason to do so, right? What do you want to achieve instead of the apparently unwanted object selection?

It's not clear to me what problem you're trying to solve or avoid. It seems like you want to avoid a selection, but I'm wondering how the selection is triggered if you don't want that.

[marty66234]

The Move tool, V

[marty66234]

If you've used illustrator, you'll know that when selecting text, it only selects the text box if the user literally clicks on the text in it. It won't activate/select the text box otherwise.

 

Notice attached. it will still select the text box even if i don't click anywhere near the 'dsfsfsdd' 

Illustrator will only select text if i click on 'dsfdsfdd' text

[thomaso]

1 hour ago, marty66234 said:

The Move tool, V

With Move Tool you can't select text (characters) but their containing object (text frame) only.

1 hour ago, marty66234 said:

when selecting text, it only selects the text box if the user literally clicks on the text in it. It won't activate/select the text box otherwise.

If you mean to say you want to select text (the characters) but without selecting the container object (the text frame), you can't do that in Affinity. A text selection always also selects the parent object, the text frame.

1 hour ago, marty66234 said:

Illustrator will only select text if i click on 'dsfdsfdd' text

When you use the Move Tool in Affinity, you cannot select text (characters), only the container object (text frame). To select text, you must switch to the Text Tool.

In fact, in Affinity, to select text (the characters), the cursor of the Text Tool does not have to hover directly over text characters (visible or special ones like tabs, indents, etc.). If you click and drag in an "empty" area of a text frame, the next text characters may be selected. For example, click-dragging after the end-of-text character § may select the last line of the last paragraph.

Whereas if you select text with multiple clicks (2, 3, 4 or 5) then you may even select the entire text inside this frame, and if it's linked via text-flow, with five clicks you may select all text in all linked text frames. While for 2 - 4 clicks the current cursor position matters, a selection via 5 clicks works at any cursor position, blank areas in text frames included.

[marty66234]

I have attached something that hopefully will clear this up for good. My point is I wanted to know if there was a preference in affinity to change it so it's similar to illustrator - which is a better approach to text selection.

It's very time consuming because the designer has to spend a lot of time resizing the text frame so it doesn't keep getting accidentally selected when selecting other objects. It's annoying.

Edited August 23 by marty66234

[thomaso]

12 hours ago, marty66234 said:

My point is I wanted to know if there was a preference in affinity to change it

There is no preference setting concerning text selection in Affinity.

12 hours ago, marty66234 said:

It's very time consuming because the designer has to spend a lot of time resizing the text frame so it doesn't keep getting accidentally selected when selecting other objects. It's annoying.

I'm not sure if the need to resize text frames is related to the way how text frames get selected in Affinity. Normally you would create a text frame of a size roughly equal to the amount of text.

Affinity does not auto-adjust text frames of the type "Frame Text" whereas "Artistic Text"  always has its frame automatically reduced to the size of its containing text and gets resized with a change of the amount of text or the text style. Accordingly, unlike a “Frame Text”, an “Artistic Text” (or “Art Text”) does not create automatic line breaks. Also accordingly, an "Art Text" frame cannot have an area below the text that you could accidentally click on.

For example, in a layout with many small pieces of text, such as text around an infographic, it may be useful to use “Art Text” frames to avoid the inconvenience of accidentally selecting the wrong text frame that just overlaps the position of another one nearby.

Fortunately, in Affinity V2 you can switch between this two types of text frames, for example starting with “Art Text” and changing it to “Frame Text” as the amount of text increases and requires more line or paragraph breaks.

[R C-R]

2 hours ago, marty66234 said:

It's very time consuming because the designer has to spend a lot of time resizing the text frame so it doesn't keep getting accidentally selected when selecting other objects. It's annoying.

Why do you need to constantly resize frame text objects? If you select one by accident with the Move tool you would still need to grab one of its handles to change its size (or rotation or shear), or do that in the Transform panel.

[lepr]

Opt/alt click to select an object that is behind the text frame. 

[thomaso]

10 hours ago, marty66234 said:

It's very time consuming because the designer has to spend a lot of time resizing the text frame

Another way to avoid the need to resize a text frame manually by dragging is the option via double-click on the frame's centre handles. Note that the order of clicking can be important, as the length of the other edge is retained: Adjusting the width preserves the height and may lead to an unwanted result. Therefore it may be preferred to adjust the height first, then the width. See below: width only | height only | height + width
 

                |                  

 

[marty66234]

38 minutes ago, thomaso said:

Another way to avoid the need to resize a text frame manually by dragging is the option via double-click on the frame's centre handles. Note that the order of clicking can be important, as the length of the other edge is retained: Adjusting the width preserves the height and may lead to an unwanted result. Therefore it may be preferred to adjust the height first, then the width. See below: width only | height only | height + width
 

Yes I'm aware of this. Again it would be better if it was the bottom right hand that was double clicked that would then reduce in size to the actual text.

 

As I clearly outlined, illustrators way is better because it relies on the text itself as the active hotspot rather than the frame.

 

If there's no option, then I suggest this as an improvement that should be done however judging by knowledge of this app, it won't be changed. I'd better find a different software that's more logical and efficient on the fundamentals.

[marty66234]

9 hours ago, R C-R said:

Why do you need to constantly resize frame text objects? If you select one by accident with the Move tool you would still need to grab one of its handles to change its size (or rotation or shear), or do that in the Transform panel.

If I'm prototyping rapidly, or just designing quickly, I don't have time to make the text box sizes perfect each time.

[PaulEC]

19 minutes ago, marty66234 said:

I'd better find a different software

Maybe you should use Illustrator, as you think everything is so much better in it!

[marty66234]

1 minute ago, PaulEC said:

Maybe you should use Illustrator, as you think everything is so much better in it!

I am confident my suggestion is an improvement. I'm posting on here because others may agree with me, therefore, more likely to make a vote to change it.

Though I was hoping there would be a preference to change the text selection works.

Edited August 24 by marty66234

[thomaso]

2 hours ago, marty66234 said:

Yes I'm aware of this. Again it would be better if it was the bottom right hand that was double clicked that would then reduce in size to the actual text.

It seems you are not aware that your concern only matters for text frames which contain less than a full line of text, for instance one or a few words only that don't fill the frame's width. For all others it is entirely sufficient to click the bottom handle only and get the height adjusted (while the width usually is not wanted to get modified).

For your described & shown use cases the "Artistic Text" frames may be far more suitable since they do permanently automatic frame size adjustment to its possible minimum.

1 hour ago, marty66234 said:

If I'm prototyping rapidly, or just designing quickly, I don't have time to make the text box sizes perfect each time.

The approach for an efficient workflow would be even more reason to create text frames as needed without having to correct them... and generally adapt habits to the new/different features when changing software... rather than requiring the new software to adapt to the familiar one.

In Affinity it's not that you can't select an object you want or avoid selecting an unwanted one, nor that you would have to manually resize previously created frames by dragging - it's rather your known and usual habits that get disturbing now. – People who are used to selecting text frames even by clicking on white space might feel disturbed if they have to hit the text when clicking.

If you want to get a new option in the app preference settings , you better create a thread in the according forum for feature request to make sure the developers will take notice of your desire. They rather avoid this "Questions" forum and leave the answers to the Serif Forum Moderators.

[R C-R]

1 hour ago, marty66234 said:

If I'm prototyping rapidly, or just designing quickly, I don't have time to make the text box sizes perfect each time.

OK, but sooner or later you will have to set them to your preferred/desired sizes & you only have to do that once, so what does that have to do with how you select them?

[thomaso]

2 minutes ago, R C-R said:

sooner or later you will have to set them to your preferred/desired sizes

Why? What if there is no preferred/desired size and unnecessarily large frame sizes only interfere with the object selection? It may be not the most efficient workflow but it could be one which someone has trained themselves to do.

[R C-R]

1 hour ago, marty66234 said:

Again it would be better if it was the bottom right hand that was double clicked that would then reduce in size to the actual text.

Why do you need to do that at all? What is the harm in having a text frame larger than needed to hold its text? As has been mentioned, you can easily select something behind a text frame via a keyboard shortcut & of course it is not unusual to want to add or edit text in a text frame one or more times while designing a project, so there are often good reasons for using large frames.

[marty66234]

Ok I am going to compromise and make this point:

In Sketch, Illustrator and Figma,when using the default Move tool, the text highlights upon hover (including all objects, too).

However, affinity doesn't highlight the text, so this makes it slower in designing. 

[R C-R]

2 minutes ago, thomaso said:

What if there is no preferred/desired size...

Then why is @marty66234 talking about resizing them to their 'perfect' sizes?

[thomaso]

32 minutes ago, marty66234 said:

In Sketch, Illustrator and Figma,when using the default Move tool, the text highlights upon hover (including all objects, too).

However, affinity doesn't highlight the text, so this makes it slower in designing. 

Can you show a screenscast example? I don't understand the "text highlight" function when hovering with the Move Tool. Usually you can see the text anyway, so why should it get highlighted for or by the Move Tool?

I understand "text highlight" as indicator for a current selection of text characters, with the goal to modify the highlighted characters without affecting non-highlighted text.  However, "text highlight" does not work with the Move Tool (fortunately) but requires a switch to the Text Tool.

In what way does "this makes it slower in designing"? – Again, it seems you "just" stick to known habits while some tools work differently in the new software. For other users it could be disturbing and slowing them down if the Move Tool would highlight text – or if they would have to care for hitting characters when selecting a text frame and experience a click on a blank text frame area as not selecting the object.

Note that if you need to hit the characters in all text frame selections, you will need to select text frames with increased precision. Alternatively, you can invest the precision in more appropriate text frame sizes and thus "save time" and enable a faster workflow by selecting text frames according to your habits.