Gregory Pittman <gregp_ky at yahoo.com> wrote on 10/01/2009 11:23:15 AM:
> On 10/01/2009 11:10 AM, Timothy J Massey wrote: > > > > I don't know how old 1.3.3.2 is, but compared to 13 it seems pretty old... > > :) > > > Ancient. Fair enough. I've found a newer one. The newest I can find is 1.3.3.12, which is hopefully not as ancient... Sure *looks* better! :) It still shows a lot of weirdness in moving lines around. I've been able to narrow down my issues more specifically: 1) When you draw a line for the first time, you can use the CTRL key to get it to draw "straight" lines. However, adjusting a line after it's drawn does not obey the CTRL key anymore: with CTRL down, you can easily (and frustratingly!) adjust lines with e.g. 1* angle instead of the 0* you really wanted. 2) When you draw a line initially, it doesn't seem to obey the "Snap to Guides". The line starts where you click, and the end point won't snap to any kind of guideline, either. However, when you *adjust* that same line, it *does* obey the "Snap to Guides"! Actually, after playing with it more, it seems fairly random whether the preview will obey the "Snap To Guides" setting... I can't yet figure out a logical pattern. 3) Imagine adjusting the right endpoint of a horizontal line. Sometimes the "Snap to Guides" feature will cause the endpoint to stay put as you move your mouse to the right, which is fine: it's snapping to a guideline. Let's say that you move your mouse a couple of inches to the right past this guide. Your mouse will continue to move to the right, but the endpoint won't. Now, you start to move your mouse back to the left. The *instant* you start moving the mouse to the left, the *endpoint* moves, too, but now it's a couple of inches away from the mouse pointer! This is *really* frustrating: you're trying to tell the computer where you want the endpoint to go, but the mouse pointer is now disembodied away from the endpoint! The endpoint shouldn't start moving left until the mouse pointer moves left of the endpoint's current preview position. This too doesn't seem to follow a logical pattern. How "tightly" a guideline holds on to an endpoint seems to be controlled by how *fast* you move the mouse! Move quickly past a guide and it will break free after, say, 1/3 of an inch. But move slowly, and it'll hold onto a point even after I've moved the mouse 1.5" or more! And once you do this, the endpoint is disembodied from the mouse pointer. And to make things worse, it seems that where the final line goes has *no* real relationship with *either* the preview line, *nor* the point where your mouse pointer ends up. 4) There are many times where I grab an endpoint and try to adjust the line. Instead of getting a dotted line drawn from the other endpoint, I get a dotted line that starts a couple of inches *below* the endpoint, and draws a line at the angle that it should draw if it were starting in the correct location (i.e. parallel to the correct line, but vertically shifted from where it should be). Once again, I'm left trying to gauge what adjustment I'm making from a line completely disembodied from the mouse pointer--and in this case, completely disembodied from the rest of the page! 5) When adjusting the endpoint of a line from one side of a guideline to another, the dotted preview line will snap to a guideline, and then release. But when you let go of the endpoint, the endpoint of the permanent line *does* snap to the guideline that you broke free from while previewing. This is not unique to lines: I've had the same thing when adjusting text frames. This is very annoying, and inconsistent: the preview, after all, does snap to guidelines. Why does the line/frame/whatever follow *different* rules in relation to the guideline when compared to the preview? Why doesn't it just go where the preview line should tell it go go? :) 6) This is unrelated, but it seems that guidelines are *very* greedy. You have to move in the neighborhood of half an inch (!) before the item will break free from a guideline. And guidelines do not share well. If you have two guidelines relatively close to each other, it is darn near impossible to get it to snap to the *far* guideline. In other words, if you have an endpoint that's to the left of a pair of vertical guidelines that are (e.g.) 0.1" apart and try to move it to the right, it will snap to the left guideline. By the time you break free of the left guideline, you are right of *both* guidelines, and it will never stick to the right guideline. First of all, it would be helpful if you didn't have to move so *very* far to break free from a guideline. (This is not a tool to help those with poor motor control: you should be able to count on the user to get pretty close to a guideline if they really want to snap something there...) But the other part would be to check to see if there are any guidelines *between* the one you're breaking free of, and the point where the mouse pointer is, and if there are, stick to them. You might even want to have the snapping logic snap to the far guideline *before* the user has gone so far as to break free of the near guideline, based on some sort of closer/farther weighting... These are just what I found after about an hour of trying to determine why lines don't work properly. Am I doing something wrong? Do I have a version that's working substantially different from everyone else's? Or is this consistent with others' behavior? Tim Massey
