Node tool problems and suggestions

[gafvert]

As a long time Illustrator user I'm now making the transition to Affinity Designer, and I'm happy with most things. However, there is one fundamental tool that I used extensively in Illustrator that keeps bugging me that it's not working the way I'm used to and expect it to work more or less every time I use it, which is very often. As the title implies I'm talking about the node selection tool (the white arrow cursor that let's you select control points in curves). Here are a couple of the things that trip me up more or less every time I use Affinity designer, and a few suggestions on how you could change this tool to make it easier to use:

1. If you don't have anything selected, you can't select anything. When you're new to Affinity this is very unexpected, and it still gets me from time to time. You have to select one or more curves to be able to then select control points in these curves. This "always isolation mode" is convenient in some cases, but is very unexpected when you have nothing selected and try to select things with a selection tool.

2. Shape pseudo-nodes/handles can't be selected. I'm not sure what these are called (I would have guessed "nodes", but probably not), but what I mean are the control widgets for shapes that are not yet converted to curves. For example if you draw a simple box or circle. If you have them selected and try to for example select the right site of the box using the node selection tool, you can't. Nothing happens. You have to first convert the shape to curves, then you can select to control points of the side. This is very unexpected if you're used to all vector shapes being made up of control points you can select, and you're used to working that way. This is also frustrating if you have multiple shapes you're editing, and you've converted some, but not all to curves. Even if you've then selected all of them you can't use the node selection tool as it'll only work on the parts that are converted to curves.

3. A selected group is not treated having all shapes in the group selected. Once you've figured out you need to select shapes you want to access with the node tool you then realize that if you have shapes grouped, it's not enough to select the group to be able to edit the control points of the shapes in the group, you have to open the group and select the elements in the group. This is even more problematic if you have complex illustrations with multiple levels of groups, which might even makes some selections of control points in different group levels impossible.

Perhaps I've missed something, or other people are using this tool in a completely different way, but I think it would be a great improvement if these issues could be resolved in some way. A few proposals that I think could alleviate these problems:

1. If you don't have anything selected, treat this as if everything was selected. In other words, only enter the "isolation mode" that limits the node tool selection if you actually have something selected, so you can have a way of selecting controls points from any shapes in the selection area.

2. Allow selection of the pseudo-nodes, handles or whatever you want to call the points controlling shapes that have not been "converted to curves". At least allowing simple things like selecting and moving these together with curve control points would be very helpful and cover most cases, even if they can't get new spline handles, rounded corners etc etc.

3. Treat having a group selected the same as having all elements selected in the group. This applies to several other tools as well, and the fact that selecting a group now isn't enough, and sometimes grouping makes it harder/impossible to edit with the node tool is pretty bad as it discourages grouping, which in turn makes a lot of other things much harder to work with in complex illustrations.

[Move Along People]

-

[PaoloT]

On 7/27/2019 at 2:08 PM, gafvert said:

3. A selected group is not treated having all shapes in the group selected. Once you've figured out you need to select shapes you want to access with the node tool you then realize that if you have shapes grouped, it's not enough to select the group to be able to edit the control points of the shapes in the group, you have to open the group and select the elements in the group. This is even more problematic if you have complex illustrations with multiple levels of groups, which might even makes some selections of control points in different group levels impossible.

I was going to ask how I could select some elements of a group with the node tool, but I see it is not possible. It is a very common operation for me (extracting elements from a complex illustration to take details), and this is a sorely missing feature.

Paolo

 

[loukash]

21 hours ago, PaoloT said:

how I could select some elements of a group with the node tool

Double-click the object with the Node tool.
Then watch the context info bar at the bottom of the window telling you what you can do with each modifier key while hovering over the object, curve or node.
Also look out for more options in the context toolbar.

Also:

The Layers panel is your friend.™

[PaoloT]

2 hours ago, loukash said:

Then watch the context info bar at the bottom of the window telling you what you can do with each modifier key while hovering over the object, curve or node.

Oh, I see. I had missed it. In reality, there is no need to double click, because Cmd-drag allows for selection of the separate elements in the group.

Paolo

 

[loukash]

Just now, PaoloT said:

In reality, there is no need to double click, because Cmd-drag allows for selection of the separate elements in the group.

Touché!