[AD 1.7.0.2] Fill Tool: new feature or bug?

[R C-R]

I was playing around with the Designer beta's Fill Tool, creating a Linear fill with several stops. When I deleted one of the end stops on the canvas, a dotted rectangle with control (??) handles appeared, but I am not exactly sure of its purpose. The image on the left shows the fill before deleting the upper stop; on the right is what I get after doing that.

 

AD beta fill oddity.afdesign (history included)

[dutchshader]

There is another post about this (can't find it) but from what i remember the extra handles are there to preserve the angle of a gradient when a shape is skewed.

[R C-R]

3 hours ago, dutchshader said:

There is another post about this (can't find it) but from what i remember the extra handles are there to preserve the angle of a gradient when a shape is skewed.

If that is their purpose, I don't understand why they appear only after deleting one of the gradient stops. I think it has to be the ending stop, but the extra handles only appear after deleting the stop on one end but not the other.

Very strange.

[Wosven]

It first appears in Publisher.  From memory, the handles only appear when reselecting a gradient, and where sometimes off, on the second page of of the spread.

[Patrick Connor]

If you only deleted a point, then that is a bug. You have not introduced any skew and an alternative linear 1D gradient will suffice. Once skewed there is a danger of it not exporting as a vector gradient

[R C-R]

Yes, I just deleted one end point of the gradient, so it seems to be a bug. Hopefully, the file with history I attached to my first post will help squash it.

[Sean P]

Hi R C-R,

Thanks for the file! I've reproduced it using your file and managed to do it on a new document! I'll get it passed on to development.

[Ben]

Ok - this is a new feature.  We now have transform stable linear, radial and conical fills.  When the total transform on the fill (which can result from the fill transform, or the parent objects) has a scale or shear, we show these correction handles. It allows you to control the shear and scale on the fill.

 

What is happening here is that the deletion of the handle is causing the fill transform to be re-evaluated, and this is introducing some element of scale or shear.  Hence why the addition handles are then visible.  If the fill rotation is different to the object rotation, the new fill scale will create some shear.  It might only be very slight - but the tolerance is fairly low when the extra handles are shown.

 

You can double click on the extra handles to correct back to 1:1 scale and remove the shear.

 

Looking at your example though, it does appear that the transform is being incorrectly modified when the point is deleted.  I'll that a look at that. - the line of the fill appears different after the point is deleted.

[Ben]

ok - there was a bug in here - and it will be fixed in the next Beta.