Efficient way to select nodes

[mdennemark]

Hi,

I have imported an svg to Affinity Designer and am trying to combine seperate lines to polylines. However, I really struggle to select the needed lines. As the gif shows, I always have to select from the outside of the bounding box, because otherwise the selection just moves. This really bothers me!

1. How can I select inside of the bounds without moving the object all the time?

2. I managed to use a lasso selection via the node tool, but actually I cant use the selected nodes to filter my selected lines and combine them.

I really hope, there is already a way of easily selecting multiple lines, without searching for them one by one. A lasso would have saved me minutes in the shown example, which is precious time considered how often this task has to be done

Best,

M

[gdenby]

Hi, mdennemark,

The v1.7 customer beta has a lasso, but only for nodes, not objects.

Start by selecting the individual lines from near their center, and then add to the selection by drawing in new marquees from the edges.

I don't know exactly what you are referring to by "polylines." I know AutoCAD allows individual lines to be formed into units called polylines. AD's method is sort of the reverse. Individual lines have little function. It is only when they are joined to form areas, which is what I suppose you want to do. After the individual objects are selected, shirt to the node tool, and use the "join curves" widget.

[mdennemark]

Hi gedenby, thanks for your reply!

Converting the individual lines to joined lines is familiar to me and quite convenient. However, selecting multiple objects, even if it is not for the case of joining lines, is quite demanding if it needs to be done step by step, since the marquee is always a rectangle and the shapes often are not. Therefore, sometimes objects need to be added step by step. Rotating the canvas could assist this process a lot. Or allowing to select inside of the given bounds of the current selection while pressing Shift, instead of moving it.

It would be great, if one could at least select indivudal nodes via nodelasso and afterwards, by for example clicking the move tool, only the objects whoms nodes were selected would remain in the selection. This would speed up selection immensly with little effort. Currently i.e. for joining lines, the node tool still considers even the unselected nodes for joining.

If there is no good solution, maybe this thread should be moved to feature request?

Best,

M

 

[gdenby]

39 minutes ago, mdennemark said:

Hi gedenby, thanks for your reply!

...Rotating the canvas could assist this process a lot.

Rotating the canvas is possible. Right mouse button gives a floating menu w. rotate right, rotate left, reset. Changes the canvas orientation by 15 deg.

[v_kyr]

Further/alternative you can also select the curve layers you are interested in to be selected via the layer panel.

[Pšenda]

8 hours ago, v_kyr said:

Further/alternative you can also select the curve layers you are interested in to be selected via the layer panel.

... and their grouping, which significantly facilitates manipulation with them.

[mdennemark]

Thanks a lot! I am adapting these methods. Still think there could be fast improvement through simple adjustments of already existing methods, but lets see what the future brings. 
So far I am doing pretty fine with AD and start liking it more and more, just need to learn new workflows.

[R C-R]

A few things you might find useful for this:

• In Preferences > Tools, there is an option to select objects when they intersect with the marquee. If that is not ticked, the marquee must fully enclose an object for it to be selected.
• Holding down the alt key before you start to drag out the Move Tool's marquee prevents it from selecting the item under the pointer & moving it. For this to work, the item under the pointer must not already be selected -- if it is, the item will be duplicated instead.
• Sometimes, switching to Outline View Mode is useful because fills are hidden so you can start the drag on a transparent area without selecting a filled object. This can also make it easier to see objects that are partially obscured by filled objects or thick strokes.
• Locked and/or hidden objects can't be selected with a click or marquee drag on the canvas, so locking or hiding items that have been joined excludes them from being accidentally included when selecting new objects to join. There is a default keyboard shortcut that locks selected objects (CMD+L on Macs) & you can assign a custom one to hide them. Using that can speed up the workflow a bit.
• There is a UI preference to auto-scroll to selections in the Layers panel. Enabling this shows where selected items are in the layer stack relative to unselected ones, which can be helpful in several ways, like for the item below this one.
• It would be too tedious to do this for every layer, but giving some of them descriptive names (or even just short number/letter designators for similar items) can make it easier to keep track of what has been or should be joined.

[mdennemark]

Really getting angry about the way of selection in Affinity Designer! Wasting hours to select the right lines. Tried all of the above mentioned tips. But please feel free to try it yourself. Attached is an svg where you can please just select the car on the left and group it. Afterwards group the other car on the right. I am not able to do this! WTF?

test.svg

Here are four different tries with 3 & 4 having marquee selection on intersection:

 

[R C-R]

9 hours ago, mdennemark said:

But please feel free to try it yourself.

In the attached test, with history.afdesign file, it took me about 15 seconds to create the two groups. Scrolling back & forth in the History panel slider should show you basically how I did it (mostly by not trying to select everything at once), but note that I have the "Select object when it intersects with marquee" option in Preferences > Tools enabled, which makes it much easier to select items to group them.

Hope this helps.

test, with history.afdesign

[Move Along People]

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[mdennemark]

Thanks SOOO MUCH! Thanks a lot for the effort!
Both approaches are working really well. Now I wrapped my head around it! 
 

Normally I am used to a selection process, where one would only Add objects while pressing Shift and not also removing them (Rhinoceros 3D) or selecting via Lasso Tool (Illustrator).
The grouping process of R C-R somehow gets close to the selection I am used in Rhino and the approach of haakoo is close to Illustrator.

Hoping that a developer might read this:  UX-wise I would still prefer a more straightforward solution that does not need a "hidden" step such as duplicating artboard, or grouping, inbetween. The Node-Tool functionality already has great capabilities to do this, but seems to miss a few steps for better usability. I hope Affinity is getting there at some point. Using Copy or Cut while nodes are selected could only take the selected nodes instead of all objects. In this way I could easily lasso and cut out nodes and afterwards paste and group them.

(Btw. Rhino uses interesecting marquee selection, if one draws it from right to left and uses non-intersecting marque form left to right. But since it is a 3D program, it also allows to rotate the view. So maybe that might not work well for Affinity Designer)

 

Thanks a lot again! Thanks to you I can enjoy Affinity Designer again! Slowly I am adapting good workflows.

 

[Move Along People]

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[Pšenda]

33 minutes ago, mdennemark said:

Hoping that a developer might read this:

Certainly is preferable to write a request to the thread for the requests, rather than relying on someone noticing it.

For example, I wrote you about grouping objects long ago, and apparently you didn't notice :-)

 

[R C-R]

2 hours ago, haakoo said:

Duplicate artboard>hide the duplicate artboard
Select all on remaining artboard>nodetool>alt+drag around the curves of car 1>delete>group the remaining nodes>hide this artboard

Maybe it is different on Windows, but in the 1.6 Mac versions, alt+dragging with the Node Tool does not do a 'lasso' type selection, just a rectangular one. The 'lasso' mode is available in the 1.7 customer betas, so I wonder if that is the app you used.

[mdennemark]

1 hour ago, Pšenda said:

Certainly is preferable to write a request to the thread for the requests, rather than relying on someone noticing it.

For example, I wrote you about grouping objects long ago, and apparently you didn't notice :-)

 

Sorry I have missunderstood your reply. I though of selecting a group through the layer panel, not grouping them. Selecting through layer panel would have been annoying, since I have had a huge amount of lines each on one layer. But grouping through selection in canvas  makes sense.
Anyways, I wrote a personal message to one of the moderators to have a look at this thread.

[mdennemark]

Just now, R C-R said:

Maybe it is different on Windows, but in the 1.6 Mac versions, alt+dragging with the Node Tool does not do a 'lasso' type selection, just a rectangular one. The 'lasso' mode is available in the 1.7 customer betas, so I wonder if that is the app you used.

I am currently using the beta. The node tool has quite some nice improvments

[Move Along People]

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[Alfred]

3 minutes ago, mdennemark said:

Selecting through layer panel would have been annoying, since I have had a huge amount of lines each on one layer.

Having clicked on one layer in the Layers panel, Shift-clicking on another layer will select that layer and all the other layers between it and the first one.

[R C-R]

1 hour ago, haakoo said:

Yes @R C-R I used the 1.7 beta

Since some users are not running the beta (or can't because they are trialing the app), it does not hurt to mention that to avoid confusion, at least in posts here in the non-beta desktop questions forum.

1 hour ago, Alfred said:

Having clicked on one layer in the Layers panel, Shift-clicking on another layer will select that layer and all the other layers between it and the first one.

That won't work unless all the desired layers are next to each other in the layer stack.

[Alfred]

3 minutes ago, R C-R said:

That won't work unless all the desired layers are next to each other in the layer stack.

Of course, which is why I wrote:

1 hour ago, Alfred said:

that layer and all the other layers between it and the first one

On Windows you can Ctrl-click to deselect/reselect individual layers. I imagine Cmd-click will achieve the same result on a Mac.

[v_kyr]

An efficient and easier way here would be to support this ...

[R C-R]

23 minutes ago, Alfred said:

On Windows you can Ctrl-click to deselect/reselect individual layers. I imagine Cmd-click will achieve the same result on a Mac.

It does, but that won't help much when there are dozens of layers & the ones a user wants to select are not all together in the same part of the layers stack.

[mdennemark]

Good discussion that evolved here! I believe there are lot of ways to achieve the same result. But what I appreciate is a good workflow that speeds up my tasks and is visually and interactively straightforward. Selecting through layer panel works, but might not always be that good, if order of lines is messed up, also it reduces the amount of information in my described problem unnecessarily. @v_kyrs video is nice in that regards. I think Affinity is close to achieving such results soon with the node tool. Though the other solutions provided here are already quite good, now that I understood them.

If I have to do those tasks several times, I am very happy about every click, step and second that I can save. - I guess thats why people often complain about the colour picker tool  

[v_kyr]

For AD when in trouble with performing a somehow accurate selection (even when objects do intersect with marquee, or shift|cmd clicking in the layers panel) just select all and rotate (-45°C in this case) and use the common rect selection. Then group that made car selection and afterwards again select all and rotate back.