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Allow objects to snap to their “ghost”, initial position during drag operations


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Hi again. This is a rehash of yet another feature request I made more than four years ago, which is still preventing me from working in Affinity Designer in a sensible fashion.

As you know, Ai implements drag operations in an '80s/'90s style “ghost” drag model (not unlike the Classic Mac OS window and icon drag model). The WYSIWYG part of the equation is the original position of the object, while the new position will be shown as a “ghost”, i.e. an outline, which you can snap to the original position of the object. This behaviour, while not being completely WYSIWYG or very elegant, is VERY useful, especially – but not limited to – when doing modular typography.

Affinity Designer, on the other hand, features a completely WYSIWYG drag mode, in which no “ghosts” exist. You just can't snap an object to its initial position, period. This is suboptimal, and forces the user to use impractical workarounds, such as duplicating objects instead, or to rely on complex grid arrangements, which may be overkill for simpler projects.

[For some context, InDesign features both Illustrator's drag model, when you perform a quick click+drag operation, and Affinity Designer's model, when you perform a longer, click+hold+drag operation.]

My suggestions (either a single one of them or a combination thereof) as to how this problem can be solved are the following:

• Add a toggle in preferences so a different drag model can be used instead of the current strictly WYSIWYG one;

• Allow users to perform a different drag model, perhaps like in InDesign, by holding the position after clicking and before dragging, but reversed (the preferred default model should still be a selectable option, as above);

• Allow users to use the Command+Drag operation to temporarily activate a ghost of the initial position (currently, this shortcut duplicates the object, which makes zero sense as the Option+Drag shortcut already does this and there's no need for two redundant shortcuts for the same operation).

As before, if you want me to make a little demonstration video of the intended behaviour, I'm more than happy to do so.

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Also, on this subject, I should add that, for consistency and usability, objects should already snap to their originals when doing Option+Drag duplication operations, which is already their behaviour when performing Command+drag operations.

And I've just realised, while looking at the status bar messages, that apparently Command is [now? Since v.1.6? Since… ever?] the default modifier for duplicating and Option the default modifier for ignoring snapping. This, per Apple's Human Interface Guidelines is completely unacceptable and inconsistent with the behaviour in the Finder and pretty much all macOS apps.

When you click and drag an icon (or an image or block of text in any text editor, like TextEdit or Pages, or any object in Keynote) while pressing Option, you will always get a duplicate, and when you click and drag the same icon while pressing Command, in a window – or the desktop – with “snap to grid” activated, the Finder will ignore the grid (and so will Keynote regarding snapping, if you're dealing with objects). WHY should Affinity behave in such a blatantly inconsistent way with the rest of macOS? It started out as a macOS app, first and foremost, and if you really must have it be consistent across OSes, at least allow the users some degree of finer control as to how modifier keys affect its operation.

You don't want to become the new Adobe (or, worse even, outdo them) when it comes to OS-app UX inconsistency, trust me on that one. Designers do not take that lightly.

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Oh, another thing: even if we accept the Command+Drag as the default behaviour for duplication operations as a fatality, let me just add that it is extremely buggy as of now in the latest v.1.7.0.12 beta. If the operation is done too quickly, AD will not duplicate the object and, instead, just drag the original, which makes it extra frustrating, to say the least.

That was not an issue in the MAS version, and if this latest beta is already an RC, as I've read elsewhere, the next MAS update will come with a new bug right out of the gate.

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What I do is 

Select the object, hold down the option key begin dragging (this makes a copy) let go of the option key (snapping is back on) and then I can snap it back in place if I so want.

Mac Pro (Late 2013) Mac OS 12.7.4 
Affinity Designer 2.4.0 | Affinity Photo 2.4.0 | Affinity Publisher 2.4.0 | Beta versions as they appear.

I have never mastered color management, period, so I cannot help with that.

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On 6/3/2019 at 5:13 PM, Old Bruce said:

What I do is 

Select the object, hold down the option key begin dragging (this makes a copy) let go of the option key (snapping is back on) and then I can snap it back in place if I so want.

Yes, that's what I eventually resorted to doing, too. Except then I end up with one (or multiple) extraneous object(s) which I then have to delete. It's an extremely cumbersome workaround, which becomes vastly impractical with larger, multi-object selections (or, worse even, selections of objects which then obscure or are obscured by others).

You see, most of my proposed solutions – which are, in a nutshell, reimplementations of stuff Adobe already did – make sense, are well thought-out and can save a lot of time. Which, for all their other failings, is a testament to Adobe's developers' foresight. These aren't just “entrenched Ai user behaviours”, as if that's a inherently a bad thing or something; they are about the only practical and logical ways of solving certain use cases. Ghost objects – whether they are a ghost of the “before” or the “after” – and self-snapping are useful and, in some cases, essential features, period. And workarounds sometimes just don't cut it.

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What is the use case for wanting to snap an object back to its original position?

Is it simply that you made a mistake and decided not to move it after all (which is easily fixed via Undo), or is it something more complex?

-- Walt
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Doesn't it work just press undo to snap it back? Not that I disagree with it being a good option to have for snapping, however.

Of some reason I managed to get it to snap to its original position in Affinity Photo in some circumstances when I activated Snap to Bounding Boxes (checked the other options below it too), but in Designer I don't get the same results. Odd.

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On 6/9/2019 at 2:34 AM, walt.farrell said:

What is the use case for wanting to snap an object back to its original position?

Is it simply that you made a mistake and decided not to move it after all (which is easily fixed via Undo), or is it something more complex?

 

On 6/9/2019 at 2:50 AM, Frozen Death Knight said:

Doesn't it work just press undo to snap it back? Not that I disagree with it being a good option to have for snapping, however.

Of some reason I managed to get it to snap to its original position in Affinity Photo in some circumstances when I activated Snap to Bounding Boxes (checked the other options below it too), but in Designer I don't get the same results. Odd.

Ok. Imagine I have an object, any object, and I want to offset it by half its length/height; being able to snap it to its former centre point needs that feature.

Imagine that I have a triangle, and I want to put one of its vertices where a different one was; same thing.

Clearly none of you must make much use of vector editors for precision work, because I, for one, use that feature in Ai all the time and I miss it dearly.

And no, this isn’t snapping an object back to its original position, you’ve just described undo. The feature I’m aiming at is being able to snap an object’s nodes or paths to the positions its nodes and paths originally were in before starting the drag operation, but still performing a drag operation to completion.

I’m not even bothering with making more demos at this point because I’m way too busy and stressed out for that. Please fire up an Ai CC trial, turn on Smart Guides (Ctrl/Cmd+U), create some objects, drag them around and notice how they interact with themselves mid-drag. Designer lacks that feature and is much more cumbersome because of that.

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13 minutes ago, JGD said:

 

Ok. Imagine I have an object, any object, and I want to offset it by half its length/height; being able to snap it to its former centre point needs that feature.

Imagine that I have a triangle, and I want to put one of its vertices where a different one was; same thing.

Clearly none of you must make much use of vector editors for precision work, because I, for one, use that feature Ai all the time.

And no, this isn’t snapping an object back to its original position, you’ve just described undo. The feature I’m aiming at is being able to snap an object’s nodes or paths to the positions its nodes and paths originally were before starting the drag operation, but still performing a drag operation to completion.

I’m not even bothering with making more demos at this point because I’m way too busy and stressed out for that. Please fire up an Ai CC trial, turn on Smart Guides (Ctrl/Cmd+U), create some objects, drag them around and notice how they interact with themselves mid-drag. Designer lacks that feature and is much more cumbersome because of that.

Well, you're right about me at least. I am a Photoshop guy primarily with decent enough knowledge about Illustrator. My assumption was that you meant snapping to object was to be able to realign it to its original position which a simple undo would have done, but I get what you mean now with your example.

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It’s very simple, really; and from an implementation standpoint, if you can achieve the same effect with an Option+Drag duplication operation, just have the Designer rendering engine create a “fake”, temporary, phantom duplicate which will be “left behind”, shown in outline view regardless of the current view mode, and delete it once the drag operation is finished, but otherwise make it behave like a real object.

It might be a little taxing on your system when dragging large numbers of objects at a time, but hey, their engine is supposedly so snappy that I don’t think that would really be a problem (also, not having to render colour, gradients, effects, transparencies, etc., should keep drag operations lean enough), and it could be turned off by default.

So, yeah, let’s be real here: out of all the features I’ve been clamoring for, this has got to be the easiest to implement and the one with the least dependencies on other parts of the app. Messing with the layer model requires a deep rethink of the app (especially the entire coordinate system, which is weird and artboard-centric, but does fit in with the current default model), but this? This is low-hanging fruit.

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15 minutes ago, JGD said:

The feature I’m aiming at is being able to snap an object’s nodes or paths to the positions its nodes and paths originally were in before starting the drag operation, but still performing a drag operation to completion.

With the move tool select the object, Duplicate it using Command + J (or what ever the Window's equivalent is). Then you can drag it all you want.

19 minutes ago, JGD said:

Clearly none of you must make much use of vector editors for precision work, because I, for one ...

Not going to comment on this after all.

Mac Pro (Late 2013) Mac OS 12.7.4 
Affinity Designer 2.4.0 | Affinity Photo 2.4.0 | Affinity Publisher 2.4.0 | Beta versions as they appear.

I have never mastered color management, period, so I cannot help with that.

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18 minutes ago, Old Bruce said:

With the move tool select the object, Duplicate it using Command + J (or what ever the Window's equivalent is). Then you can drag it all you want.

Well, I’ve already addressed that before, but since you’re mentioning it as a workaround, I’ll repeat what I’ve said before: yes, it’s a functional workaround, for a few objects at a time and on a clean canvas; on a busier document, when selecting large numbers of objects or symbols, it gets totally crazy and is wildly impractical. I know because I’ve tried it in Designer already and completely hated it; I’d have trouble selecting just the objects I wanted by dragging a selection rectangle, and then would have to click them one by one (sometimes having to resort to outline view because they would be partially obscured by the new objects I had just created). And it’s a workaround and requires extra clicking and finagling, it’ll always be suboptimal at best.

18 minutes ago, Old Bruce said:

Not going to comment on this after all.

Well, if I may ask, was it because my point finally came across, or do you feel I stepped over some line by making assumptions? If it’s the former, great; if it’s the latter, I’m sorry for making generalizations. But hey, I did guess that @Frozen Death Knight doesn’t use Designer mostly for precision, geometric work… I mean, not all of us do, and there’s nothing wrong with that.

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2 minutes ago, JGD said:

the lack of developer feedback on four-year-old basic requests

It has been stated time after time in many threads that Serif employees read these threads in the Feature Requests but as a matter of policy rarely will they comment on them.

 

On 6/3/2019 at 7:10 AM, JGD said:

Designer, on the other hand, features a completely WYSIWYG drag mode, in which no “ghosts” exist. You just can't snap an object to its initial position, period.

I don't know what you mean by "You just can't snap an object to its initial position". It is possible, it is simple and there is more than one way to do so.

Mac Pro (Late 2013) Mac OS 12.7.4 
Affinity Designer 2.4.0 | Affinity Photo 2.4.0 | Affinity Publisher 2.4.0 | Beta versions as they appear.

I have never mastered color management, period, so I cannot help with that.

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43 minutes ago, JGD said:

Well, I’ve already addressed that before, but since you’re mentioning it as a workaround, I’ll repeat what I’ve said before: yes, it’s a functional workaround, for a few objects at a time and on a clean canvas; on a busier document, when selecting large numbers of objects or symbols, it gets totally crazy and is wildly impractical. I know because I’ve tried it in Designer already and completely hated it; I’d have trouble selecting just the objects I wanted by dragging a selection rectangle, and then would have to click them one by one (sometimes having to resort to outline view because they would be partially obscured by the new objects I had just created). And it’s a workaround and requires extra clicking and finagling, it’ll always be suboptimal at best.

Well, if I may ask, was it because my point finally came across, or do you feel I stepped over some line by making assumptions? If it’s the former, great; if it’s the latter, I’m sorry for making generalizations. But hey, I did guess that @Frozen Death Knight doesn’t use Designer mostly for precision, geometric work… I mean, not all of us do, and there’s nothing wrong with that.

Correction. I do use Illustrator for precision work (my last Illustrator project was building an entire user interface with vectors for a games company), but I am not so well versed in Illustrator that I can describe every feature missing in Affinity like I would be able to do with Photoshop. When you brought up your example I understood what you meant, but I couldn't really deduct what your particular user case would be when you brought the feature up initially. I can understand Old Bruce's reponse to your statement, since it was quite a bit of a sweeping generalisation.

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39 minutes ago, Old Bruce said:

It has been stated time after time in many threads that Serif employees read these threads in the Feature Requests but as a matter of policy rarely will they comment on them.

Indeed, you are right. However, they could and should eventually pop up in the roadmap. Well, maybe they won’t until version 3, 4, or never will, but that, too, would have consequences, which I’ve alluded to before.

39 minutes ago, Old Bruce said:

I don't know what you mean by "You just can't snap an object to its initial position". It is possible, it is simple and there is more than one way to do so.

I’ve explained it 3 or 4 times already in this thread, but here it goes again this time worded in a different way; it’s the same behavior as (or at least functionally similar to) when dragging in Ai, or the same behaviour when duplicating an object by Option+Dragging and snapping it to its original instance (not outright superimposing it – though that could certainly be an option, and I do use it sometimes in Ai for some applications – but, say, snapping node A to node B’s original position).

I won’t be doing video demos just now because I have a viva to prepare, but sure, come the 25th I’ll get around to it. This feature is essential and easy enough to implement for me to justify doing those.

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27 minutes ago, Frozen Death Knight said:

Correction. I do use Illustrator for precision work (my last Illustrator project was building an entire user interface with vectors for a games company), but I am not so well versed in Illustrator that I can describe every feature missing in Affinity like I would be able to do with Photoshop. When you brought up your example I understood what you meant, but I couldn't really deduct what your particular user case would be when you brought the feature up initially. I can understand Old Bruce's reponse to your statement, since it was quite a bit of a sweeping generalisation.

Oh, ok. I stand corrected, then. As for my generalisation, you’re right, it was uncalled for.

Anyway, before leaving once again, I’ll just ask you to trust me on this one; the workarounds offered, while very nice and well-intentioned of you, pale in comparison to what’s possible with this feature, and many of us will benefit immensely from it. Even some of those who may have never tried it in Ai, let alone in Designer (well, it’s not like they could, either, because it doesn’t even exist).

And those videos will further stress my point, because while some of you already “got it”, it was only on an abstract level and even you may be shocked at just how cumbersome it would be to try and redo some of my older Ai projects in Designer. They’re technically possible to make, because Designer is already mature enough in the print production department, but would take me perhaps more than twice as long to do so (and no, considering I do a lot of pattern/symbol-based backgrounds, with hundreds of repeated elements at a time and not always in neat orthogonal or isometric grids, that’s very likely not hyperbole).

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28 minutes ago, JGD said:

but, say, snapping node A to node B’s original position

That is what I was missing. 

I have been talking apples about your oranges.

Mac Pro (Late 2013) Mac OS 12.7.4 
Affinity Designer 2.4.0 | Affinity Photo 2.4.0 | Affinity Publisher 2.4.0 | Beta versions as they appear.

I have never mastered color management, period, so I cannot help with that.

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14 minutes ago, Old Bruce said:

That is what I was missing. 

I have been talking apples about your oranges.

Ahaha oh well, no worries, then. I mean, as much as I use all my software in English and give workshops and classes on this kind of stuff, English is not my native language, so I’ve introduced some unnecessary ambiguity there.

Anyway, that A-B scenario finally made it clear, but it’s just peanuts in the grand scheme of things; you’ll finally see why I’m so fed up with waiting for this feature once you see the kind of stuff I did with it.

For some of the simpler projects, I could’ve (nay, should’ve) probably used some built-in pattern-making tools in Ai (and maybe I was a bit dumb and lazy for not having taken the time to learn them way back when, and ended up wasting a lot of time and processor cycles, yes), but some of them, with progressive pseudo-gradients, selectively supressed objects, etc., really called for a greater degree of control and the ability to manually duplicate tens, hundreds or even thousands of objects at a time, and properly snap them to the rest of the pattern right away. Once you see me in action it will all finally make so much more sense.

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  • 4 weeks later...

Yeah, I'm bumping this with a wee suggestion:

Perhaps the “ghost” in the original position could be always rendered in a slightly translucent fashion (whether in preview or in outlines mode), instead of as an outline. What do you think? It would likely still work, UX-wise, and look a bit more WYSIWYG and modern, just like the guys at Serif like.

As for the video demos, oh, they are a-coming once I get a proper vacation (I mean, since I can't code and I'm proposing stuff that's a little bit different than what Illustrator offers right now, I'll have to set up entire special documents on either of them, with real “fake” ghosts – actual objects underneath those I'll be moving – just to visually simulate what I'm getting at, and it'll take a while). I may be boycotting any further word-of-mouth marketing of Designer, but I still want it to succeed.

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  • Staff

Only just seen this thread.

 

I have to ask - what does having a ghost of the original object give you that cannot be simply achieved by holding down Shift to constrain the translation?  The constraining will be perform along the same vectors through which bounding box snapping would be performed - so there is no need for the original object context.  Constraining can be toggled on/off at any time during translation.

For scaling purposes, snapping can only give you 1:1 with the original shape.  The only extra I can see is snapping to the centre line of the original shape (a 50% scale).  This can already be achieved by applying a 50% scale in the transform panel.

There is no snapping through rotation, so a ghost achieves nothing there.

 

For all other tools, such as the node tool, snapping to invisible original positions is not so helpful and often provides too much snapping visual overload.  Constraining is, again, what provides transformation relative to an original position - it has also been balanced with other methods such as constraining a point along it's original line vector (as opposed to grid axes).

 

As usual - I'd ask for use cases to be presented so that we can assess whether a change is justified.

 

We also don't just implement mechanisms because they existed in 20 year old apps.  There's a chance that there is a better way.

 

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On 6/3/2019 at 3:28 PM, JGD said:

Also, on this subject, I should add that, for consistency and usability, objects should already snap to their originals when doing Option+Drag duplication operations, which is already their behaviour when performing Command+drag operations.

And I've just realised, while looking at the status bar messages, that apparently Command is [now? Since v.1.6? Since… ever?] the default modifier for duplicating and Option the default modifier for ignoring snapping. This, per Apple's Human Interface Guidelines is completely unacceptable and inconsistent with the behaviour in the Finder and pretty much all macOS apps.

When you click and drag an icon (or an image or block of text in any text editor, like TextEdit or Pages, or any object in Keynote) while pressing Option, you will always get a duplicate, and when you click and drag the same icon while pressing Command, in a window – or the desktop – with “snap to grid” activated, the Finder will ignore the grid (and so will Keynote regarding snapping, if you're dealing with objects). WHY should Affinity behave in such a blatantly inconsistent way with the rest of macOS? It started out as a macOS app, first and foremost, and if you really must have it be consistent across OSes, at least allow the users some degree of finer control as to how modifier keys affect its operation.

You don't want to become the new Adobe (or, worse even, outdo them) when it comes to OS-app UX inconsistency, trust me on that one. Designers do not take that lightly.

This "issue" has been discussed and explained at some great length in other threads.  I'm reluctant to go over well trodden ground, other than to say there are some very fundamental reasons why we chose how the modifiers behave.  It is 100% intentional.

 

You can have your opinion on this, but our choice of modifier keys is not going to change. While Apple may have decided that Alt should be used for copy, not many apps use combinations of modifier keys to open up greater functionality in the way we do.  The keys are so chosen because they relate to how the core tools (Pen, Node, Move) function, physical key placement and cognitive process.  The use of both Cmd and Alt for performing cloning has always been a compromise that has annoyed me - but it was made to placate those who see Apple's choices as immoveable (regardless of any wider implications).  Had it been down to us, we would only have offered Cmd for cloning.

 

They may not be what you are used to.  That is not justification enough for us to break wider usability.

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5 hours ago, Ben said:

Only just seen this thread.

 

I have to ask - what does having a ghost of the original object give you that cannot be simply achieved by holding down Shift to constrain the translation?  The constraining will be perform along the same vectors through which bounding box snapping would be performed - so there is no need for the original object context.  Constraining can be toggled on/off at any time during translation.

For scaling purposes, snapping can only give you 1:1 with the original shape.  The only extra I can see is snapping to the centre line of the original shape (a 50% scale).  This can already be achieved by applying a 50% scale in the transform panel.

There is no snapping through rotation, so a ghost achieves nothing there.

 

For all other tools, such as the node tool, snapping to invisible original positions is not so helpful and often provides too much snapping visual overload.  Constraining is, again, what provides transformation relative to an original position - it has also been balanced with other methods such as constraining a point along it's original line vector (as opposed to grid axes).

 

As usual - I'd ask for use cases to be presented so that we can assess whether a change is justified.

 

We also don't just implement mechanisms because they existed in 20 year old apps.  There's a chance that there is a better way.

The way I understood it is that he wants to be able to do things like snap to the mid point of an object's original position the same way as if you had two objects in a document where one object can snap to the other object's mid point. Here's a video demonstration that I believe gets the point across:

As you can see, you are able to make two objects snap to each other's mid point, but when you only have one object, you can't make it snap to what JGD calls a "ghost object". JGD's suggestion of having a "ghost object" would also allow you to snap to the outer edges of your original object's position, so you would have several ways to snap without the need for duplicates; left, right, bottom, and top edges and of course the mid point.

I think it would be a pretty decent snapping option to have in the magnet menu, since you would no longer need to duplicate the same object to get the same snapping result.

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12 minutes ago, Frozen Death Knight said:

but when you only have one object, you can't make it snap to what JGD calls a "ghost object". I think it could be a pretty decent snapping option to have, since you no longer need to duplicate the same object to get the same snapping result.

Hi @Frozen Death Knight,

just an idea: snapping to the mid point is equivalent to move an object by 50% of its width. Use the transform panel and type in 'X+w*0,5' where X is the value that is already in the box. In other words you would type '+w*0,5' after the X value. This moves an object to the right. Same applies to vertical movements or in combination with a minus in the other direction.

This even works for fractions where there is no snapping point at all, like fourths or thirds :)

d.

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4 hours ago, dominik said:

Hi @Frozen Death Knight,

just an idea: snapping to the mid point is equivalent to move an object by 50% of its width. Use the transform panel and type in 'X+w*0,5' where X is the value that is already in the box. In other words you would type '+w*0,5' after the X value. This moves an object to the right. Same applies to vertical movements or in combination with a minus in the other direction.

This even works for fractions where there is no snapping point at all, like fourths or thirds :)

d.

Thanks for the tip! That could come in very handy. :D

That said, it is a solution, but I do think it would be pretty nice if we had that snapping option I mentioned earlier as well. Certainly wouldn't hurt to have. :P

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14 minutes ago, dominik said:

Use the transform panel and type in 'X+w*0,5' where X is the value that is already in the box. In other words you would type '+w*0,5' after the X value.

Or, just click in the X box, which highlights the current content, and replace it by typing +=w*.5

 

-- Walt
Designer, Photo, and Publisher V1 and V2 at latest retail and beta releases
PC:
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