[AD] Force pixel alignment is still placing nodes in between pixels

[Friksel]

When 'Force pixel alignment' is turned on all drawing from that moment is snapping to whole pixels. But when you start moving those just drawn curves (all created on whole pixels) around you see they are still resulting in half pixels some times.

So I did some switching in snapping options and found out that Force Pixel Alignment isn't on top of it all (highest priority). There are certain other snapping options that still cause Designer to chose off pixels. Like 'include margin midpoints', but also other important snapping options, like 'snap to grid'. Look at this:
(for the record: ''Move by whole pixels' is turned off)

In my opinion this is confusing, misleading and error prone and the unexpected endresult remains hidden to designers while designing, because we (well at least I do) assume all graphics will be snapped to pixels when 'Force pixel alignment' is set to true. I place this under bugs, because I really believe designers should be able to trust that 'Force pixel alignment' will indeed force pixel alignment, and right now it's not and most of the time we don't even know it until problems occur (like blurry images as an end result we see when we finished the design and 'render' to png for example).

In the video you can see clearly the node is bing placed on a half pixel because it's prefering the margin snapping over pixel forcing. But you can only see that now while looking very closely on a zoomed-in grid of 100x100 and even a visible pixel-grid turned on. Normaly we don't work like that and need to trust Designer to always pick/snap to whole pixels if we set 'Force pixel alignment' to true. Why else would we turn that setting on and the setting is a prominent button on the UI that's different to other snapping options.

So it seems like this is causing the half-pixel issues I was having for drawing graphics. I found out that Designer has a 'pixel work' preset in snapping options that turns off all other snapping options making sure forcing to pixels works. So yes, that preset (all other snapping turned off) will probably always work with pixel work and always chose whole pixels. But if we need to turn off all snapping options just to work on whole pixels that seems a little too black and white / one or the other to me. I want to use both and consider that to be a very standard expected workflow more designers like to use; I use snapping options a lot, but I only want to enable force pixel alignment next to that as a top priority(-correction) at the end.

In my opinion force pixel alignment should always be priority over all other snapping options, so in practise I would expect Designer to fire it's snapping algorithms first and then correct the end position of those snappings to the nearest pixel when Force pixel alignment is turned on.

[Gabe]

Hi @Friksel,

 

The Snapping guides and candidates do not work in a hierarchy. Once you turn them on, they stay on regardless. If you have "Include bounding box mid point" on, and that object's bounding point falls on a half pixel value, it will snap on that point, because that's what you've asked it to do. The snapping does not work on a "stop rule if true" basis. All the guides that you have would work, and not be influenced by other options. 

On 12/9/2018 at 1:22 PM, Friksel said:

Normaly we don't work like that and need to trust Designer to always pick/snap to whole pixels if we set 'Force pixel alignment' to true. Why else would we turn that setting on and the setting is a prominent button on the UI that's different to other snapping options.

1px grid, Force Pixel aligmnent on and snap to mid point on. 

What would you expect in this scenario? Where should it snap? Left or right of that half pixel?

moved to feature requests. 

[Friksel]

6 hours ago, GabrielM said:

@Friksel

What would you expect in this scenario? Where should it snap? Left or right of that half pixel?

moved to feature requests. 

I don't agree with this being moved to feature requests, but that should be obvious by my post.
Next to this you explain how things are working now, but I know how things are working now. Thing is in my opinion it shouldn't work like this.
Snapping to pixels is not something we like for layouts, but to be able to have our fills on exact pixels as far as horizontal and vertical goes. That should never be influenced by other snapping tools, that are used for layout purposes. Because when they do, like Designer is working rightnow, you simple cannot rely on 'Force Pixel Alignment' as a designer, because in way too many scenarios it's just not snapping to pixels and as a designer you don't even know that it isn't working when designing, because you only see it when zoomed in or happen to know this problem.

I'm starting to wonder if people realy understand the purpose of this switch.

We can talk about all kinds of scenarios with all kind of snapping functions turned on or off, but that doesn't hit the point here. Thing is that snapToPixel should snap to pixel. Nothing more and nothing less. And right now in most snapping-configurations it is not snapping to pixels. Which I call an issue.

It doesn't matter how snapping functions are set, in the end in Force Pixel Alignment (snaptopixel) should always be applied in the end. And if a designer decided to turn on snap to the center of a curve or whatever else snapping function and that happens to result to half a pixel, then the same applies as when a user has his cursor on a half pixel: round it to a whole pixel. It doesn't matter if Designer choses the left or right one if it's exactly in the middle of 2 pixels. The only thing that matters is that it's always calculating in the same way. To either exact half pixels all chose the right side, or they always chose the left side. That way we can finally work on whole pixels as designer and use snapping options too. That is just impossible right now.

 

[Msmeraglia]

yeah this still happens in v2 and I agree with the above, with force whole pixels, should force WHOLE pixels not half pixels. It kind of defeats the point.