The transparent areas of (point) text boxes should not be selectable.
It is difficult / impossible to select any object below any portion of a (point type) text box, even when the area under the cursor is completely empty / transparent. In the attached screenshot examples, the pink line is not selectable because it is covered by a text box, even when there are no active pixels or vector data under the cursor within the text area. No other objects in Illustrator behave this way. Transparency is supposed to be non selectable. Illustrator treats the entire text box as an object with a fill, even though text boxes completely lack a fill attribute. This is especially frustrating since a text box is necessarily bigger than the physical bounds of the actual visible characters.
I would like to suggest a change to the type settings to introduce a check box for 'type selectable by character only.' The current setting of 'type selectable by path only' is practically unusable since it refers not to the character paths, but to the baseline, which is effectably an imaginary and invisible line which isn't actually a path anyways. While it's true that live type doesn't have paths until its expanded, it seems apparent that the software knows where the paths theoretically are since all live type is visible in outline mode.
This simple update to the type setting would give users two clear options to choose from: type is either selectable by the entire text frame ~or~ is selectable only by the outlines of the text.
Dan
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