Designer: Please let us turn off "treat all objects as filled."

[Stokestack]

Currently, if you click on an empty (hollow, unfilled) area that's surrounded by an object, Designer will select that object. This is frequently (perhaps even usually) not what you want, especially since there can be numerous objects surrounding the empty area (thus making the selection uselessly ambiguous anyway). Currently in Designer you have to use the Option key to cycle through ALL overlapping objects. That is a deal-breaker. I find it incredible that this is deemed an acceptable way to work. How many illustrations don't have objects depicted within the boundaries of other objects?

 

In the attached example, I can't select the blue line by clicking on it, even though nothing's covering it.

 

 

Please fix this.

[Bri-Toon]

I see what you mean, but if that green box was a stroke, and the A wasn't there, then clicking on the hollow space wouldn't select anything. I'm seeing that the hollow space to filled objects and text will select those objects, but not for strokes.

[Hokusai]

Stokestack,

 

I requested this before but it was a long time ago (probably within the first month of Designer's release) and I completely agree with you. This is important to anyone who uses a lot of Boolean operations. It is difficult and annoying to try to select what you want when there are other items on top (but they have holes or spaces cut out of them). It would be helpful if there was a preference for selecting behaviour. 

 

Hokusai

[Fixx]

Yes, how AD behaves now is non standard.

[Stokestack]

It's not even a matter of Boolean operations. I could have also used the "combine" operation on the inside and outside curves of the green box to create the same effect.

 

I don't see how people work with this. Do you all seriously click, click, click until you get to the object you want? And what if there's a very similarly-shaped object underlying the one you want? Then it'll look like the one you want is selected, when in reality it's the underlying one. Then you get to start your click, click, clicking all over... and what? Start counting how many clicks it takes to get to the object you want to work on?

 

And in a complicated illustration, poring over the layer list looking for objects isn't going to help either.

 

I'm mystified by an art program where you can't click on objects on the canvas to manipulate them.