Object orientation.

[R C-R]

3 minutes ago, jackamus said:

Exactly. - it is common sense because you can visually see what the object is and how it would ought to be viewed.

What does that have to do with it? No matter what angle it is hung at the picture frame dimensions do not change.

[Move Along People]

-

[jackamus]

3 minutes ago, dutchshader said:

You could just create a horizontal arrow and make a asset from it, and create a verticlal arrow and make a asset from it.

No need to rotate

Yes I could but I would also have to do that with the extension lines!

This would not be a problem if the Cycle box did what common sense tells you it should do but it doesn't. It always reverts back to its original orientation. This not intuitive!

[jackamus]

2 minutes ago, haakoo said:

You are only saying that because your common sense tells you that it is a a picture hung the wrong way.. If it was just a rectangle that had no feature to say which way round it should be then the Transform tab would appear to be wrong! I keep saying that it is a visual thing and its size would appear to be wrong to the uninitiated. Again I say the Cycle box is a good tool if it was permanent until each time it was used - it would make a big difference for me.. I suppose it could be switchable for the purists.

[Move Along People]

-

[R C-R]

1 minute ago, jackamus said:

What I don't seem to get you guys to understand is this is a VISUAL problem - What you see is not what is shown in the Transform tab. Anyone looking at this for the first time would assume it must be wrong because the size for Height is smaller than the size for width ( after rotating that is).

The Transform panel shows the dimensions of the object's selection box. If someone assumes it shows anything else (which would mean they have not considered the clues provided by the box's handles in the workspace & the orientation & markers of the anchor points in the Transform panel) then they have made a bad assumption.

The correct solution for that problem most certainly is not to have the width & height values suddenly swap when the object is rotated by 90° (but not by other angles)! That would be absurd.

[Move Along People]

-

[R C-R]

2 minutes ago, haakoo said:

But then there's no use for the cycle selection box button where it is changing the width and height when pushed.

There are several uses for that, like changing what an object snaps to, or changing the width or height in the Transform panel (either by precise numerical amounts or by scrubbing on the "W" or "H" label).

But maybe more to the point, consider Jack's Orientation.afdesign file. By using an arrow shape instead of a line with arrowheads, he has made it much more difficult than it needs to be to create those lines & adjust them as needed for any object, whatever the rotation.

To see what I mean, consider this Orientation re-dimension.afdesign file. I am too lazy to do the whole thing but by using lines with arrowheads instead of arrow shapes, it becomes much easier to use duplicates (or a line asset if one prefers) to resize & rotate them to fit to the size of different items.

Granted, it doesn't (yet) provide the ability to customize the shapes of the arrowheads like with arrow shapes, but for most uses I think one of the built-in arrowheads should work well enough.

[Alfred]

1 hour ago, R C-R said:

No matter what angle it is hung at the picture frame dimensions do not change.

My thoughts precisely! If you have a square picture frame of side 10″ hanging straight on a wall it will occupy a 10″-wide space on the wall, and if you rotate it through 45° it will occupy a space which is 14.14″ wide but it will still be a 10″ square.

[jackamus]

1 hour ago, haakoo said:

But then there's no use for the cycle selection box button where it is changing the width and height when pushed.
To have the new orientation be validated either have a commit button that changes the width/height when the rotating has been done or lose the cycle selection box button altogether

Exactly my point.

[R C-R]

1 hour ago, jackamus said:

2 hours ago, haakoo said:

But then there's no use for the cycle selection box button where it is changing the width and height when pushed.
To have the new orientation be validated either have a commit button that changes the width/height when the rotating has been done or lose the cycle selection box button altogether

Exactly my point.

Please see my reply to what @haakoo said about there being no use for the cycle button. The ability to cycle through the different selection boxes without having to do an extra step to "validate" any of them is a feature with several uses. And it still makes no sense to treat 90° rotations as a special case that confusingly would work differently from other rotations.

[jackamus]

I think I've taken this thread about as far is will go for my purposes. There have been some useful suggestions that I will play with.

One of the things I've discovered about AD is that it impossible to get anything changed unless there is a bug in it. This would suggest that at all times it is perfect and works perfectly for all users at all levels. There's no answer to that unless someone knows differently.

I would like to say that this forum is one of the best I have ever used and issues get responded to very quickly. I have much to be thankful for.

[Alfred]

1 minute ago, jackamus said:

One of the things I've discovered about AD is that it impossible to get anything changed unless there is a bug in it.

That isn't remotely true, in my experience! There are many things which were working as originally designed but for which the design has since been improved.

[jackamus]

Yes I tell a lie! I suggested being able to curve the teeth on the Cog QS to make them look more like gear wheels and it was very quickly adopted.

All I can say is that as far as I'm concerned is that snapping gui9des accurately, for me that is, AD1.7.2 is worse than 21.6.5. I never ever had a problem getting guides to snap to where I wanted them in AD1.6.5 but today I can't and that particular thread is locked and it would be wrong of me to try and raise it again.

[jackamus]

I have tried to use the stroke with an arrowhead on each end using the Arrow feature but this isn't any use because the arrow heads are added to the stroke length which will make the dimension line too long. So I will have to go back to using my Asset dimension lines.

 

[walt.farrell]

19 minutes ago, jackamus said:

I have tried to use the stroke with an arrowhead on each end using the Arrow feature but this isn't any use because the arrow heads are added to the stroke length which will make the dimension line too long. So I will have to go back to using my Asset dimension lines.

I'm not sure I see how that's related to this topic, but you need to check which option you've chosen for placement of the arrows. Sounds like you want the "within the line" option shown below:

[jackamus]

5 minutes ago, walt.farrell said:

I'm not sure I see how that's related to this topic, but you need to check which option you've chosen for placement of the arrows. Sounds like you want the "within the line" option shown below:

Are these two tiny arrows supposed to tell me something? I can't make out what they are trying to tell me because of the dark grey background! I believe complaints have been made about the dark backgrounds by others.Is there an option to make the backgrounds much lighter?

[walt.farrell]

5 minutes ago, jackamus said:

Are these two tiny arrows supposed to tell me something? I can't make out what they are trying to tell me because of the dark grey background! I believe complaints have been made about the dark backgrounds by others.Is there an option to make the backgrounds much lighter?

Feel free to look at it in the Light UI, now that you know where the option is located in the Stroke info   (that will also give you the tooltips).

It shows that the arrow is within the end of the line (left icon) vs extending beyond the end of the line end (right icon).

[R C-R]

2 hours ago, walt.farrell said:

I'm not sure I see how that's related to this topic, but you need to check which option you've chosen for placement of the arrows. Sounds like you want the "within the line" option shown below:

I think @jackamus was responding to this post of mine suggesting using lines with arrowheads instead of the Arrow Tool for dimension lines. Considering what he said in his earlier post about getting anything changed other than to fix a bug, it is perhaps more than a little ironic that both the  arrowhead stroke style & the cycle selection box feature itself are prime examples of things that were not added to fix bugs but at least in part because of user requests.

The arrowhead stroke style is particularly useful for dimensional callouts, because among other things it makes it much easier to create line styles like the one on the left below. Try duplicating the angle with the Arrow Tool & I think you will see what I mean.

That said, I agree completely that the poor contrast choices in the Dark UI makes it unnecessarily difficult to see (among many other things!!!) what the 'place arrow' buttons do. However, I am almost certain that the Place arrow within the line button is the default & of course their tooltips make it clear what each of them does.

[jackamus]

13 hours ago, walt.farrell said:

Feel free to look at it in the Light UI, now that you know where the option is located in the Stroke info   (that will also give you the tooltips).

It shows that the arrow is within the end of the line (left icon) vs extending beyond the end of the line end (right icon).

Thanks Walt. In future I will use the stroke with arrow heads when doing dimensions.

None of the three UI options are useful. i use the OS setting but the Light is as bad as the dark only in the opposite way. There is not enough contrast to make out the tool tip graphics against its background. It may make for attractive graphic design but is not very practical.

[jackamus]

9 hours ago, R C-R said:

 

The arrowhead stroke style is particularly useful for dimensional callouts, because among other things it makes it much easier to create line styles like the one on the left below. Try duplicating the angle with the Arrow Tool & I think you will see what I mean. 

That said, I agree completely that the poor contrast choices in the Dark UI makes it unnecessarily difficult to see (among many other things!!!) what the 'place arrow' buttons do. However, I am almost certain that the Place arrow within the line button is the default & of course their tooltips make it clear what each of them does.

A long time ago I asked Serif to add a dimension tool just like they had in DrawPlus. I'm not holding my breath!

BTW the tooltips do not make it clear what each of them does- see my reply to Walt.

[R C-R]

26 minutes ago, jackamus said:

BTW the tooltips do not make it clear what each of them does- see my reply to Walt.

I am not sure what you mean by that. The tooltips for the two options say "Place arrow within the line" & "Place arrow at the end of the line." To me that is about as clear an explanation as one could hope for, & if it is not just toggling between them once should do it.

That said, I could not agree more that the Light UI has not solved the longstanding low contrast issue that some of us have complained about since the first version of Designer was released for Macs in 2014.

In fact, for some things it only makes it worse. This is what the Stroke panel looks like in AD version 1.7.3 on my Mac with the Light UI & the default UI gamma:

It is no better with any other gamma setting -- the arrow placement & swap heads & tails buttons use such low contrast that they might as well be empty. 

[jackamus]

22 minutes ago, R C-R said:

I am not sure what you mean by that. The tooltips for the two options say "Place arrow within the line" & "Place arrow at the end of the line." To me that is about as clear an explanation as one could hope for, & if it is not just toggling between them once should do it.

 

 

It is no better with any other gamma setting -- the arrow placement & swap heads & tails buttons use such low contrast that they might as well be empty. 

Sorry I meant the actual graphic is not clear. I have to say that I never noticed the tooltip 'explanation' appearing and as you said it is very creal what they do. Put it down to my age.

[R C-R]

Just now, jackamus said:

Sorry I meant the actual graphic is not clear. I have to say that I never noticed the tooltip 'explanation' appearing and as you said it is very creal what they do. Put it down to my age.

I don't think you have to be an oldster like we are to find this lack of contrast very annoying. And while I understand quite well that designing better icons would take a lot of time & effort (there are over 2000 icons in AD alone!), I also think Serif's developers & icon designers (assuming they are different people) do not understand that this remains an unresolved major usability issue for many of us.

I am not sure why that is but I have just about given up hope that it will ever be fixed. 

So what I have done as a workaround is to set the tooltip delay to a lower value than the default so I don't have to wait as long for them to appear. It is only a partial solution but it is better than nothing.

[walt.farrell]

3 hours ago, R C-R said:

It is no better with any other gamma setting -- the arrow placement & swap heads & tails buttons use such low contrast that they might as well be empty. 

That is bad. Bug reported: