Selections

[ciscrh]

I have several small graphics items laid out in a grid for my convenience and I need  to select several of them to duplicate and use elsewhere in the document.

I can drag a selection rectangle enclosing several adjacent items to select them, but I cannot find a way of selecting several non-adjacent items. I've tried using combinations of the Shift, Alt and Ctrl keys to add/remove from the selection but nothing seems to work. At the moment I either have to select, copy and move a super set of the items and then delete the unwanted items or else select, copy and move individual items. Is there a way of doing this?

The attached screen grab image hopefully makes it clearer: For example, how would I make a selection of just the C7, E7 and F7 chord diagrams?

If I were using PPX9 I'd put the items on the pasteboard so that they were easily accessible for all pages, but I understand it is a design decision not to share a common pasteboard across all pages in Affinity Publisher. I also briefly investigated  making the items assets, but that didn't seem a practical way forward to me once I saw the size of the diagrams in the Assets tab.

[Alfred]

3 minutes ago, ciscrh said:

I also briefly investigated  making the items assets, but that didn't seem a practical way forward to me once I saw the size of the diagrams in the Assets tab.

In Designer — so presumably also in Publisher, but I can’t check right now — you can edit the asset labels to give you meaningful tooltips on mouseover.

[fde101]

You can also switch the display to a list format and show the names right next to them.

[ciscrh]

Thanks for the comments on Assets, which make them more useful to me :-)

The primary purpose of my comment relates to selecting objects & the attached image was just to give an example of my difficulty.

[Wasp11b]

I find that a discontiguous selection on the page can be made by just shift clicking each item. The bounding box may appear to select more items but after shift-clicking whatever items you want, you can copy and then paste to the page you want. Note - you can also select from the layers panel - here Ctrl-click selects discontiguous items.

Alternatively, you can zoom out (Ctrl-wheel) after selecting and then move your selection to the pasteboard ie off the page. You can then select an item or items on the pasteboard and move them directly to a page in zoomed out view or right click and cut or copy (or use the Layers panel) and then on the Pages panel select the page you want by double-clicking and then paste. 

Works for me on Windows. May be a better way of implementing but hope that helps.
 

[Typo998]

Hi ciscrh,

You can go on the Layer panel and select with the mouse using CTRL.

Thanks!

[ciscrh]

On 11/19/2018 at 10:54 AM, Wasp11b said:

I find that a discontiguous selection on the page can be made by just shift clicking each item. The bounding box may appear to select more items but after shift-clicking whatever items you want, you can copy and then paste to the page you want. Note - you can also select from the layers panel - here Ctrl-click selects discontiguous items.

Alternatively, you can zoom out (Ctrl-wheel) after selecting and then move your selection to the pasteboard ie off the page. You can then select an item or items on the pasteboard and move them directly to a page in zoomed out view or right click and cut or copy (or use the Layers panel) and then on the Pages panel select the page you want by double-clicking and then paste. 

Works for me on Windows. May be a better way of implementing but hope that helps.
 

Thanks, Shift-click seems to work. I was seeing a bounding box surrounding all the selected items and just assumed that it meant all items in the box were in scope of the selection, but as you say, that is not the case. On a page I would have expected the Ctrl-click to work here, but it does something weird: In my experiments it is selecting items within a group and potentially disrupting the existing group, which is not something I want to do accidentally.