Bounding Box permanent rotation makes no sense

[axteryo]

Why does it make no sense? Because it falsifies the actual dimensions of your work IN-EDITOR.

When I go to export, I don't want to factor in the "Empty pixels" that are added when selecting a rotated object. And because export settings seem to be on a ratio, it is cumbersome. 

I've searched online and I've not been the only one with this problem of having the skewed bounding box throw off their work. Is there a method of disabling it? Cause the reset button is temporary.

 I come from an inkscape background,  and i love this software so far, but this might be a deal breaker for me.

[Friksel]

Why not post this in a bugs of feature request forum instead?

[Alfred]

2 hours ago, BofG said:

A work around is to draw a new shape, select that and your rotated object, union (Add in context menu) then divide and delete the shape you added.

As long as the new shape is smaller than the rotated object and completely enclosed by it, there’s no need to divide and delete. Alternatively, you can can draw a new shape which completely encloses the rotated object, select both and choose ‘Intersect’ instead of ‘Add’ (from the icons in the Geometry section of the main toolbar rather than the Context toolbar or the context menu, the latter being the right-click menu).

Edited June 2, 2019 by Alfred
Corrected typo

[firstdefence]

1 hour ago, Alfred said:

you can can a new shape

Is this how you can can a new shape?

 

[JET_Affinity]

Quote

Bounding Box permanent rotation makes no sense

I have big problems with any program that requires dragging stupid bounding box handles for all its on-page transformations. Like you, I have no use for the countless situations in which the default bounding box doesn't even reflect the actual bounds or dimensions of the paths. (And while I'm at it, I despise the current fad for those stupid rotation lollypops. Why does one need four, let alone  five handles for rotating a bounding box?)

Example:

Draw a square.

1. Draw a circle inscribed in the square.
2. Rotate the circle 45 degrees.
3. Group the two paths.
4. Rotate the Group 45 degrees.

The resulting bounding box and its dimensions are utterly useless, reflecting the bounds of the corners of the rotated circle's bounding box, and enclosing a bunch of white space. Cycling the bounding box, the unwanted bounding box is still displayed and looks like an object that isn't even there. That's a hideous interface treatment.

But let's not throw out the baby with the bath water. The ability to retain and recall a bounding box that has undergone some rotations can be quite useful, as in the common case of needing to scale a rotated ellipse by its major or minor diameter.

It's not that object's being able to remember and recall their rotations "makes no sense." That ability is one of the historic advantages of, for example, Deneba Canvas. And it is also potentially advantageous over Adobe Illustrator, which often "loses" that information when you need it.

It's just that the current treatment in Affinity's interface needs some serious work. Yes, making a reset of the bounding box permanent should be possible (and not require a goofy workaround), but optional.

JET

[axteryo]

6 hours ago, BofG said:

It's an annoying quirk, the reset option really should be permanent. A work around is to draw a new shape, select that and your rotated object, union (Add in context menu) then divide and delete the shape you added. The rotated object will now have it's bounding box reset.

thank you I will try this!

[R C-R]

14 hours ago, JET_Affinity said:

(And while I'm at it, I despise the current fad for those stupid rotation lollypops. Why does one need four, let alone  five handles for rotating a bounding box?)

That 'lollypop' handle is very useful when one wants to rotate a tiny object on a large canvas without having to zoom way in on it, like in this 5th handle example.afdesign file. The other handles -- there are actually eight others -- have multiple functions & options -- check the Status bar at the bottom of the window as you move the pointer over & near them if you have not yet discovered them all.

You can also use the "Reset Selection Box" button and/or the "Show Rotation Center" feature along with those options to resize, shear, or rotate the object in various ways, all on the canvas.

If that isn't enough to convince you this more than just a fad, the customer betas have added still more options like alignment handles & transforming objects separately that make it possible to apply a number of transformations to multiple objects in a single operation.

[JET_Affinity]

Quote

That 'lollypop' handle is very useful when one wants to rotate a tiny object on a large canvas without having to zoom way in on it...

Bah, it is merely visual clutter. If I'm going to rotate a tiny object by dragging it, I'm going to zoom in, so I can see what I'm doing with at least some measure of accuracy. Dragging a handle that isn't even located anywhere on the object nor even on its bounding box is superfluous junk. I've got along fine without it for about 35 years.

I think it's a mere accommodation to finger painting on a mobile touchscreen with one's blunt thumbs and digits; an inappropriate interface and something I do not want when doing serious illustration on a proper desktop.

A well-implemented rotation tool, on the other hand, lets you mousedown literally anywhere to rotate a selection about its transformation center–which it can also set anywhere–without switching tools, while abiding by all snaps both upon mousedown and during drag, and regardless of zoom.

Quote

The other handles -- there are actually eight others --

I know how the BB handles work, RC-R. There are four other rotation handles on the BB.

JET

[R C-R]

36 minutes ago, JET_Affinity said:

Bah, it is merely visual clutter. If I'm going to rotate a tiny object by dragging it, I'm going to zoom in, so I can see what I'm doing with at least some measure of accuracy.

But not everybody always wants or needs to do that. IOW, what some see as visual clutter, others see as a useful feature.

38 minutes ago, JET_Affinity said:

A well-implemented rotation tool, on the other hand, lets you mousedown literally anywhere to rotate a selection about its transformation center–which it can also set anywhere–without switching tools, while abiding by all snaps both upon mousedown and during drag, and regardless of zoom.

Except for the "literally anywhere" part, that is what that 'lollypop' handle offers. For that, there would have to be a separate rotation tool (because otherwise the Move Tool would just select something else or deselect whatever is currently selected, depending on where on the canvas you clicked).

I am aware that some users would like that (& it has occasionally been mentioned as a feature request) but having worked with apps that implement move, rotate, & sometimes other functions as separate tools, I have much the same reaction to that as you do to the Affinity implementation -- it just seems like an unnecessary complication that far more often than not ends up costing me more time to change tools, use whichever one provides the function I want, & then switch to another tool to do whatever I want to do next.

I am not saying that one of us is right or wrong about this. I am just saying that everybody will never agree on what is well implemented & what is not. That goes for just about any app, not just the Affinity ones. That means that no matter what the developers decide to implement or how they decide to implement it, some users will love it & others will hate it. So while they do try to consider feedback from everybody, at the end of the day they have to go with what they think the greatest number of users will at least find acceptable, doesn't compromise any of their pre-established design goals, doesn't overly bloat the apps, & so on.

Personally, I think they have done that quite well but as always, YMMV.

[Ben]

22 hours ago, JET_Affinity said:

A well-implemented rotation tool, on the other hand, lets you mousedown literally anywhere to rotate a selection about its transformation center–which it can also set anywhere–without switching tools, while abiding by all snaps both upon mousedown and during drag, and regardless of zoom.

The new Point Transform Tool in 1.7 provides this functionality.  Default drag applies rotation+scaling. Use key modifiers to apply scale, rotation or translation independently.  It also applies appropriate snapping.

 

The only thing it probably does different to what you are saying is that it requires you to drag an existing point.  Dragging inside the object, off points, will only offer translation.  Arguably this could offer scale or rotation, but I use the selected point to apply snapping - without that point snapping becomes less user friendly.

[R C-R]

58 minutes ago, Ben said:

The new Point Transform Tool in 1.7 provides this functionality.

About that, the help topic for this new tool says it has a (default?) keyboard shortcut & it should be "F." However, on my Designer beta it was unassigned. I had no trouble assigning "F" to it in the preferences but should I have had to do that?

[walt.farrell]

1 hour ago, R C-R said:

About that, the help topic for this new tool says it has a (default?) keyboard shortcut & it should be "F." However, on my Designer beta it was unassigned. I had no trouble assigning "F" to it in the preferences but should I have had to do that?

F works for me on Windows, but it is not shown in the tooltip if you hover over the Point Tranform Tool's icon in the Tools menu.

[R C-R]

40 minutes ago, walt.farrell said:

F works for me on Windows, but it is not shown in the tooltip if you hover over the Point Tranform Tool's icon in the Tools menu.

For me on my iMac, after I set the shortcut manually in preferences it does show in the tooltip, either when the Point Transform Tool is a separate icon or when it is the current selection in the icon shared with the Node Tool.

But it did not show, nor was it functional, until I set that shortcut manually.

[JET_Affinity]

15 hours ago, Ben said:

The new Point Transform Tool in 1.7 provides this functionality.

And, unless I'm missing something, doesn't work on a subselection of nodes.

Typical transform tools work the same way on current selections of any kind. Why do we need both a special "Point Selection Tool" and the separate and cumbersome Transform Mode of the Node Tool?

I'm sorry, but this is not interface elegance. It feels like afterthought scattered functionality just to stay married to the infernal bounding box fixation.

JET

[R C-R]

6 hours ago, JET_Affinity said:

Typical transform tools work the same way on current selections of any kind.

But to transform anything, something must first be selected, right? Depending on the app, this could be done with the transform tool itself or by using some other tool or method. A reference point of some kind must also be chosen. So how do you combine all these functions into one tool so that, for example, you could select either an entire vector object or just some of its nodes without changing tools or tool modes?

7 hours ago, JET_Affinity said:

I'm sorry, but this is not interface elegance. It feels like afterthought scattered functionality just to stay married to the infernal bounding box fixation.

What vector oriented app does not include bounding boxes? What exactly would be an alternative that you would find more elegant?

[Ben]

While bounding boxes might not be your thing - they are for people that concentrate on layout rather than illustration.  Maintaining the editable bounding box is therefore useful to some.

The Point Transform Tool will be improved - this is only version 1.  It will complement the Node and Pen tools more - I'd already thought about node subselection operations, but my time is a finite resource. I also have other improvements in mind that I don't want to discuss yet. If you don't want to see bounding boxes - these will be your tools.

[JET_Affinity]

2 hours ago, Ben said:

If you don't want to see bounding boxes…

 

4 hours ago, R C-R said:

What vector oriented app does not include bounding boxes?

Oh, c'mon, guys. "Having" bounding boxes is not the problem. I fully understand their utility. The problem is having on-page transformations dependent upon them, in lieu of proper (and cleanly implemented) transform tools. That is substandard.

The core problem is very simple: You can put any number of superfluous "handles" or "hot spots" along or near the edges of a bounding box and they all still have the same problem: They are not located on the details you are manipulating. To use them for transformations, you mouse down somewhere else. That fails to clarify what you actually want to drag and snap to something else.

Users struggled with this and couched their complaints in terms of needing to transform sub-selections. So the awkward Transform Mode of the Node Tool (already an unintuitive interface approach) was added. But alarmingly, that committed the very same core fallacy. It also is dependent upon silly bounding box handles for transformations of sub-path elements. To ostensibly provide "direct" and "accurate" manipulation of details of paths, you again require dragging something other than what you are actually manipulating?! What other program does that?

So next, the awkwardly named Point Transform Tool is added. It has a few subtle innovative behaviors which I like. But it has the same problem that gave rise to the demand for the Transform Mode of the Node tool; inability to manipulate sub-selections.

I'm as opposed to unnecessary "tool glut" as anyone. But now, evidently in order to avoid adding conventional transform tools, we have two awkward and rather unintuitive feature sets which, combined, still fall short of the functionality more directly and economically provided by (much as it pains me to say it) the conventional transform tools in Adobe Illustrator. As it stand right now, we have less functionality with more interface clutter, requiring more clicks.

And I'm still waiting for someone to explain why one needs five rotation handles on every bounding box.

JET

 

[dutchshader]

50 minutes ago, JET_Affinity said:

And I'm still waiting for someone to explain why one needs five rotation handles on every bounding box.

JET

 

when the rotation point is one of the corners an i just want to rotate an little bit, then i use the opposite corner to rotate.

that explains 4 of them .

[R C-R]

58 minutes ago, JET_Affinity said:

The core problem is very simple: You can put any number of superfluous "handles" or "hot spots" along or near the edges of a bounding box and they all still have the same problem: They are not located on the details you are manipulating.

By "details," do you mean the nodes of vector objects or something else? If it is nodes, then I can't imagine anything more intuitive or easier to use for this than a Node Tool -- after all, the details of vector objects are defined by their nodes.

If you mean something else, I would really appreciate a clearer explanation of what that might be because I am finding it very hard to imagine a single tool that does everything you said you wanted without resorting to providing a variety of tool modes, much like the Affinity apps (& Illustrator) do now. 

[Ben]

@JET_Affinity As I said, the Point Transform Tool (so named because "Transform Tool" was apparently confusing to some people) will at some point also operate on node sub-selections.  It doesn't yet.  Again, I want it to complement the node tool, since it performs transformations from node points.

[JET_Affinity]

On ‎6‎/‎5‎/‎2019 at 4:02 AM, R C-R said:

What vector oriented app does not include bounding boxes?

For decades, there was a common comeback whenever FreeHand users complained about Illustrator's cumbersome two separate selection tools (and their associated problems):

Many, if not most, longtime AI users (including at least one of its developers) would claim to "never use the black pointer", but to always use the so-called "Direct Select Tool," as if doing that were some kind of indication of "greater expertise" with the program.

I would always counter by pointing out that, in Illustrator, that would mean they never used the bounding boxes, which I would further demonstrate are useful for such things as scaling an ellipse by its major or minor diameters (assuming the BB remembers its original orientation).

So again: Yes, there are many who eschew bounding boxes, and no, I am of course not opposed to a program having bounding boxes. I am opposed to on-page transformations being dependent upon them.

23 hours ago, dutchshader said:

when the rotation point is one of the corners an i just want to rotate an little bit, then i use the opposite corner to rotate.

that explains 4 of them .

The transform anchor can be set anywhere. With a transform tool, it can be set by merely clicking where you want it, without having to find an icon to click in a control bar to display it, and then dragging it to where you want it.

And a typical rotate tool effectively provides you with a "rotation handle" located anywhere. How is that less convenient (let alone less powerful) than having to used one of five hot spots that aren't even located on what you usually want to snap to something else anyway?

23 hours ago, R C-R said:

By "details," do you mean the nodes of vector objects or something else?

I mean any detail of any selection. Suppose that on the page you have a raster image of Orion, the cat, and a path with an arrowhead, which is already where it needs to be. You want to rotate the raster image by mousing down on the center of the jewel hanging from Orion's belt (the detail of interest) and dragging it such that the arrowhead would be pointing at the jewel. You can do that with a typical rotate tool in one move, and the bounding box of the raster image (and its various rotation hot spots) is completely immaterial to the desired move.

So by "detail of the selection", I'm not just talking about the snap-sensitive subparts of vector paths, like nodes, although that is certainly one of the most obvious applications.

23 hours ago, Ben said:

As I said, the Point Transform Tool (so named because "Transform Tool" was apparently confusing to some people) will at some point also operate on node sub-selections.

I acknowledge and applaud that. But there's more.

As I've said many time, I'll never consider Illustrator the default program to emulate. But with its fairly customary transform tools you can:

• Click to set a transformation center. Then mousedown and drag anywhere to perform the transformation. The tool is snap-sensitive. So if you mousedown on a node, you can drag the selection by that node and snap it to any snapping candidate, including candidates beyond the reach of the selection (thereby "aiming" the node you are dragging at that remote snapping candidate). The same transformation tool can be used exactly the same way on any current selection, be it whole paths, partial paths, raster images, symbols, clipping masks, text, or any other kind of construct. This is pretty much what the Affinity beta Point Transformation Tool does, except that in Illustrator,
• All of the various transformation tools (Scale, Rotate, Skew, Reflect) work the same way. So although there are several transform tools, that in itself is intuitive, and there is consistency in the interface.
• DoubleClick any of the transform tools opens a dialog for numeric entry of values appropriate to that tool, including the option to transform one or more duplicates of the selection instead of the original. (FreeHand was even better at this, because it did not disjoint a path at its unselected nodes during so-called "power duplication" of sub-selections. This empowered certain reiteritive transforms which Illustrator cannot do.)

So yes, there are four icons in the toolbar, and I'm as opposed to "tool glut" as anyone. But this is more concise and tidier than having to select a tool, then traverse to an options bar to put it in some other "mode", click a series of other icons to set its other behavior details, and then finally mousedown and drag on the page. All that comprises more "tool glut" than four grouped transform icons in the primary toolbox. And there's more:

I'm also not entirely crazy about modal dialogs. But in this case, they have the advantage of storing their respective last-used settings. This is powerfully useful for many things, and not just in conjunction with the Transform Again command; the last-used transformation performed by each tool can be recalled no matter how many other things you've done since, including changing the current selection. Just doubleClick the pertinent tool and tap Enter.

If you can accommodate all that for all of the usual common types of transformations into a single transform tool, my hat's off to you (as it always is anyway). But in terms of intuitive, powerful, and easily discoverable interface design, there may be good reason why mainstream drawing programs have gravitated toward toolbox tools for performing tactile transformations.

JET

[Alfred]

8 minutes ago, JET_Affinity said:

I'm also not entirely crazy about modal dialogs. But in this case, they have the advantage of storing their respective last-used settings.

As far as I’m aware, whether or not a dialog is modal should only affect the user’s ability to do other things while that dialog is displayed. I don’t know of any reason why the type of dialog would affect the storage of last-used settings.

[JET_Affinity]

9 minutes ago, Alfred said:

As far as I’m aware, whether or not a dialog is modal should only affect the user’s ability to do other things while that dialog is displayed. I don’t know of any reason why the type of dialog would affect the storage of last-used settings.

I'm not saying modal dialogs are desirable if they are better avoided. I'm saying that Illustrator is replete with archaic modal dialogs, but even in spite of that, its transform tools still provide the greater functionality described and presents it more concisely.

JET

[R C-R]

13 minutes ago, JET_Affinity said:

But in terms of intuitive, powerful, and easily discoverable interface design, there may be good reason why mainstream drawing programs have gravitated toward toolbox tools for performing tactile transformations.

This seems considerably different than what you said in this earlier post:

On 6/3/2019 at 6:01 AM, JET_Affinity said:

A well-implemented rotation tool, on the other hand, lets you mousedown literally anywhere to rotate a selection about its transformation center–which it can also set anywhere–without switching tools, while abiding by all snaps both upon mousedown and during drag, and regardless of zoom.

I have read & reread all that you have posted here several times, but I am still not completely sure about what tools you want or how exactly you think they should work. Some of it seems more about personal preferences than anything intrinsically more intuitive or better implemented than something else. Some of it also seems somewhat self-contradictory, but maybe that is just because I don't understand what you want.