Should invisible objects affect a layout?

[joe_l]

I stumbled upon this today. Creating two text frames lying on each other. One has a text wrap applied, the other not. When I now make the frame with the text wrap invisible, the text wrap is still calculated.

Is this by design? I would say, that INVISIBLE elements should have NO impact on a layout.

[carl123]

It's been raised before and it's by design 

[walt.farrell]

If hiding an object made the whole layout change unpredictably that would be quite jarring. In fact, in that case, hiding an object on one page might ripple through to the end of the document in ways you didn't expect, and require a complete re-inspection and fix up of everything that follows.

[joe_l]

46 minutes ago, walt.farrell said:

If hiding an object made the whole layout change unpredictably

Who said unpredictably? I always quite often sometimes know what I do. From your own experience, how often did hiding an object ruined your layout? I must confess, that my experiments were not based on a real use case.

[GarryP]

Serif seems to have made the decision that hiding a layer doesn’t stop that layer from participating in the text flow.

This means that you can temporarily make the images on a page invisible, for example, so you can concentrate on the text without the overall text flow being changed.

If this was not done, every time you changed the visibility of a layer that was participating in the text flow, the whole of the text ‘after’ that layer may need to be re-positioned, as Walt said above.

I can see some reasons why someone might want to exclude a layer from participation in the text flow when hiding it but I think that sort of thing would be something for a feature request – maybe an “Exclude from Text Flow” option somewhere in the Layers Panel.