Make an option for the Bounding box to hug text tightly
For the love of God, please make an option for the bounding box around text to only bound to the visible text. When I'm aligning text, either visually or by inputting numbers in the transform panel, I absolutely do not care about invisible space, what I want is what I can see to be centered or aligned. I'm so sick of having a text box snap to a guide or object, or me inputting exact numbers in the transform panel, only for the text to be offset and misaligned. if this option DOES exist, then make it obvious that it's there, because in twenty plus years of using Illustrator, I've never seen it or come across it.
Sean
shared this idea
-
Illustrator is the only editor that still draws the bounding box not by the dimensions of the actual glyphs, but by their em boxes.
CorelDraw, Affinity Designer, Xara, Inkscape, Photoshop... all draw the bounding box tightly hugged (InDesign drops out a bit because it doesn't have out-of-frame text).
Illustrator tried 4 years ago to make modes for text alignment, as stated below, but it came out non-obvious and hardly convenient. A partial solution. There are hacks, but they are, well, stupid.
We need to get it addressed. -
iviansur
commented
Honestly, the recent "Set font height reference" feature has been one of the best features for the past several years—I'd say it's better than the text-to-image AI feature. "Align to glyph bounds" was another excellent invention. For some reason, the Illustrator team stopped there. We need this bounding box aligned to glyph bounds feature, too!
-
Carl
commented
Yeah, that's what I (and Hassan, I suppose) mean. I know it's not a bug, it's just VERY annoying when you have a lot of objects close to (and behind) the text and you keep selecting the text by mistake.
-
You mean this?
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/s/xw40w426142evjs/text_bbox.gif
Well, AI does it right then. See, letters have descenders:
https://www.designersinsights.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/Anatomy-of-Typography.png
AI selects text based box around all elements of the text.
Still, it doesn't mean that it can't be made that it will select text only when you click in actual glyphs, but I expect it would take more power to calculate. This also means that you will have gaps in text where you can click and not select anything, if gap is larger than selection tolerance.
Well, you can ask for omitting ascenders and descenders for lower-case (and remember which glyph is uppercase too), but I afraid it will still confuse people.
I'll vote for this, but it will make a lot of tests and precautions to make it right. -
Carl
commented
Egor: The problem is the "selection area"/bounding box around the text, and the fact that it's way too big. You're constantly selecting the text by mistake when clicking other objects nearby. And when aligning, Illustrator aligns this invisible bounding box (I know there's a workaound for this but you shouldn't have to use that trick) instead of the actual text.
It would be nice if you could select (and align) the text by clicking the actual letters. As if the letters were expanded shapes.
-
Carl
commented
I agree. That invisible (which for some fonts is insanely large) area around the text is very annoying. You keep selecting text objects by mistake.
-
Hassan
commented
Text Selection Area
