Why Serif's affinity to centered "elements"?

[Joachim_L]

Do not take this topic too serious ... It must have been a long discussion among the Affinity developers and marketing people to not copy everything from other layout programmes. Otherwise the fact that quite a few parts / functions in Publisher are working "centered" is not explainable. But at some point this centric behaviour is a bit annoying.

a) Rotating elements with the transform panel Rotating elements manually (without setting transform origin) -> from the center

b) Resizing images inside a picture frame -> from the center

c) Placing images with Place Tool (simple click) -> Placed centered

d) Placing docx with Place Tool (simple click) -> Placed centered

e) Whereever I click the gray caret in Navigator panel -> Mouse centered in the gray caret afterwards

f) ... to be continued ...

Next topic: I want to talk about Serif's affinity to cats!

 

[garrettm30]

2 hours ago, Joachim_L said:

a) Rotating elements with the transform panel -> from the center

Not to be too serious, but at least on your first point, it only rotates from center if that is what you selected. When I opened a new document and added a simple shape, the selected reference point was the upper left, and that is the point at which it rotates.

Some of those other aspects may be affected the same way, but I don't have as much experience in those areas.

Now I look forward to the topic of the cats!

[Joachim_L]

1 minute ago, garrettm30 said:

Not to be too serious, but at least on your first point, it only rotates from center if that is what you selected.

My fault, initially I meant manually rotating an element ignores the selected handle in the transform panel. You have to set the Transform origin to get rotated around a desired point. It would be much faster if the standard transform origins could be set in the transform panel.

[garrettm30]

Yes, on the point of manually rotating an image, I think a valid suggestion would be that the rotation point could be done from whichever corner one rotates. Or perhaps from the exact opposite corner, as I think seems to make more sense in my mind.

 

For example, if I were to rotate from the lower left point, as in the image above, I might expect the upper right corner to be anchored, and the side I have grabbed to be moveable. For center rotation, we would still have the rotation handle at the top. For the present, the rotation handle and all four corners do the exact same thing.

Edit: I changed my image to better illustrate what I tried to describe.

[MEB]

Hi garrettm30,
Press and hold ctrl on Mac (or the right mouse button in addition to the left one on Windows) to rotate the object around the opposite corner.

[AlainP]

With the shape selected click on any of the 9 points under "Transform". Then you will see an indicator (like a target) appear in your shape. Move it anywhere with your mouse, even way outside of the shape... this is the anchor point for the rotation. 

[garrettm30]

Thanks, MEB. I didn't know that trick. It already does exactly what I described. 

[garrettm30]

4 minutes ago, AlainP said:

With the shape selected click on any of the 9 points under "Transform". Then you will see an indicator (like a target) appear in your shape. Move it anywhere with your mouse, even way outside of the shape... this is the anchor point for the rotation. 

When rotating with the move tool, the rotation is separate from (does not respect) the transform panel. Are you using a different tool or a mode I have missed?

[Joachim_L]

16 minutes ago, MEB said:

Press and hold ctrl on Mac (or the right mouse button in addition to the left one on Windows) to rotate the object around the opposite corner.

Nice one, but why the prolonged <- correct word? handle over the top middle handle, when you can do the same with the handles in the four corners?

7 minutes ago, AlainP said:

With the shape selected doubleclick on any of the 9 points under "Transform". Then you will see an indicator (like a target) appear in your shape. Move it anywhere with your mouse, even way outside of the shape... this is the anchor point for the rotation.

Not very intuive from my point of view. Yes, if I want to have a special transform origin, but not if I simply want to rotate an element around e.g. left middle handle. In competitor products you can use the handles in the transform panel to set the transform origin.

@garrettm30 you have to doubleclick the handles to enable this.

[MEB]

Hi garrettm30,
Click the Enable Transform Origin button from the context toolbar and move the target that will appear on canvas to wherever you want. The rotation will then me made around that point (it's the same result as double-clicking the anchor grid in the Transform panel).

[Joachim_L]

One forgot, which I mentioned already in an other post. When I want to flip an element I can't do this with a custom transform origin, means the element stays at place and the "content" is just only flipped. Item f) on my "center list".

 

 

[garrettm30]

9 minutes ago, Joachim_L said:

Nice one, but why the prolonged <- correct word? handle over the top middle handle, when you can do the same with the handles in the four corners?

I think I agree with Joachim_L here. Since there is already a dedicated center rotation handle, I would have preferred that rotating from the corners would default to the behavior that presently requires the modifier. My reasoning is that it is more easily discovered without needing to know a trick that is probably buried somewhere in the manual.

But it is probably too late to change now, as people who have been using Designer extensively for the past four years might not care to change after they have entrenched the habit.