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
shared this idea
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A related topic:
Cannot select objects near text object
https://illustrator.uservoice.com/forums/601447/suggestions/42380587 -
Different apps offer different text click targets: metric box that includes ascenders and descenders (like Illustrator does) , trimmed per line or pre character but including areas in glyphs and between glyphs (Photoshop, Inkscape, Affinity, most web tools...), or the ink area — something you want and the exact thing Corel DRAW and Xara do (and recently Graphite stopped doing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KnwDfXJP9SU&t=497s)
Ai at the moment offers no option for this (and by default it’d be a pain for the majority, I’m sure), but there is a way to select the line behind it, a technique that exist in Ai since Old Days.
— Make sure the Control Click to Select Objects Behind in Preferences > Selection & Anchor Display is enabled it is by default).
— Select the text and hold Ctrl (not sure about the Mac). The cursor would switch into either Direct Selection or Group selection (depending on which one you used last)
— Click once on the type and notice the cursor gets a '<' next to it, meaning the next click would select an object below
— Click one more time to select the line (and click more to select deeper)A caveat — Smart Guides know nothing about this mode and won’t highlight the line (dumb of it). So you’d need to 'hunt' the line (and it could lead to select larger targets below, sadly.
There is also a known workaround to at least shrunk the bounding box tightly: apply the Outline Object effect to the text and enable Use Preview Bounds.
A valid request, I upvote it too. Thanks!
