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Rectangle to Text Frame "feature" or bug?


thetasig

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I've been playing around with a text box and a rectangle that sits "behind" the box to frame the text with a colored background. Initially, creating the rectangle was straightforward. Drag it out to the desired size, then go to the top options and choose a Fill color. Fine. Then, while adding text to the text box (and careful to do so only in the text box) and resizing both the text box and the rectangle, suddenly the rectangle changes to a text frame ). In the Layers, this shows up as a "(Shape Text)"

The transition point happens when the Frame Text Tool (that was being used on the Text Frame to edit the wording and resize the Text Frame) touches inside the Rectangle.  This can happen while using the Frame Text Tool cursor to expand or shrink the Rectangle by dragging the frame. If you happen to accidentally click inside the Rectangle, it changes to a Text Frame. But I cannot find a way to reverse that to change it back to a rectangle.

This may not be considered a bug (a design feature enabling changing the rectangle to a text frame with a single click), but is certainly unexpected behaviour. And, I'd like to know how to change it back to a rectangle if that is possible.

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It is the intended and (I believe) documented behavior that clicking on a shape with the Frame Text Tool converts the shape into a Text Frame. There's something similar with the Studying Text Tool.

Question: Why are you putting a rectangle behind your Frame Text to get a stroke and fill? Text Frames in Publisher support those attributes natively. Just open the Text Frame studio panel to specify them and you'll avoid the problem you're having.

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... or lock the layer of the rectangle (or any background shape) to prevent its selection.

If you even group the background with the text layer you can move & transform both simultaneously, still with locked background object.

macOS 10.14.6 | MacBookPro Retina 15" | Eizo 27" | Affinity V1

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8 hours ago, thetasig said:

If you happen to accidentally click inside the Rectangle, it changes to a Text Frame. But I cannot find a way to reverse that to change it back to a rectangle.

I would adopt the option @walt.farrell suggests, i.e. use Text Frame (View > Studio > Text Frame) to add a background colour to your text frame, together with text indents, that way you overcome the issue.

However, if you do want to reverse it and change it back to a rectangle you can right-click and select Convert to Curves.

Affinity Designer 2.4.1.2344 | Affinity Photo 2.4.1.2344 | Affinity Publisher 2.4.1.2344
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Thanks so much for all of your answers - very helpful. Just so you know, I have a couple of ways of using the separate frames - the colorful one sits behind the text but is offset to one side and up higher. So the frames overlap but are not aligned - a graphic representation. Of course, the other way is what you described so well where the frames are aligned and I use that also. I had forgotten (or was it that I had not yet learned) about the text frames having those native features. That last bit was a surprise - to "change it back to a rectangle you can select Convert to Curves" - very non-intuitive to me as I'm not sure how curves enter into the circumstance. But if it works, why not? And, very helpful to learn about locking layers - I'll work on that.

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thetasig, thank you for your feedback. You also might like the rich options of "Decorations" in Paragraph Panel.
It allows to colorize text background, optionally with offset and additional boarder(s), on each edge separately.

Notice that here text + color (fill + stroke) are done with 1 object only + can be saved as paragraph style, too.

1178515926_decorationframecolor.jpg.002ac9fee5a869848ae1d6e0bb6e0f08.jpg


Combined with text background color set in Character Panel:

523691064_decorationframecolor2.jpg.1b06caca889f6e9dfae3f4468916433e.jpg

The same object with centre aligned text:

1270585705_decorationframecolor3.jpg.22799429a9a217aca87f1c7fce54f15b.jpg

 

macOS 10.14.6 | MacBookPro Retina 15" | Eizo 27" | Affinity V1

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  • 2 years later...
On 9/28/2019 at 12:34 PM, thetasig said:

That last bit was a surprise - to "change it back to a rectangle you can select Convert to Curves" - very non-intuitive to me as I'm not sure how curves enter into the circumstance. But if it works, why not? And, very helpful to learn about locking layers - I'll work on that.

Thanks for this! I couldn't figure out why I only sometimes couldn't change the colors of my text layers as I was making edits.

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