Direct Select tool selecting unnecessary groups
Steps to repeat making unecessary groups (just one of many ways) in order to test how they break the direct select tool, and cause unpredictable appearances:
1) make a rectangle.
2) apply a "3D Extrude & Bevel" effect
3) Expand appearance
Now that you've flattened your 3D object, you'll have an extra 4 unnecessary groups come along for the ride. But you won't know this unless you use Vector Firstaid, or use the appearance panel to manually inspect the situation (argh!).
4) Now use the direct select tool to click in the centre of one paths of the shape (direct select one of the paths – not a line or point)
5) look in the appearance panel
Expected behaviour: the appearance panel should display the path (as usual)
Actual behaviour: the appearance panel displays the (unnecessary) group above the path
Result: if you modify the appearance of the selection using the eye dropper, or the appearance panel, the modification is applied to the group. This appearance will interact with the appearances on the path bellow, as well as the (necessary) group above, causing anomalous behaviour. This requires the user to either manually enter the path appearance by double clicking in the panel, to manually remove the unnecessary group, or to use an additional paid plugin.
Unnecessary groups are a routine part of using Illustrator. They don't just add bloat - they get in the way of the direct select tool and cause unpredictable appearances.
Suggested solution: ensure that the direct select tool ALWAYS directly selects the target art item, and never a group.
Bonus points for creating fewer unecessary groups as a matter of course.
Mark Nicoll
shared this idea
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Mark Nicoll
commented
Hi Egor, cheers for the reply.
The main potential problem I can think of if this gets changed is if the new behaviour fails to account for selecting groups with additional appearance attributes.
Existing behaviour: direct select on appearances (eg. strokes or fills with effects) on a group that contains any number of art items: selects the group. I don't have a problem with this - it seems reasonable.
Problematic solution behaviour: direct select never selects groups: always art items.
Problem: groups with strokes and fills are unselectable by the additional appearances on the group. This would make it harder to select things on the canvas by eye without using outline view.To avoid the above scenario, the selection behaviour just needs maintain its current distinction between groups with and without strokes and fills. The only real change is that this behaviour is made consistent between groups containing a single item and groups containing more than one item. And... yeah, I can't think of any problems arising from that.
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Another impact of this is that I've been working on a script for building a semantic hierarchy of items based on text in the grouping structure; it's essential to be able to attach additional tags to these text items, but if they're in a group by themselves they're unselectable and thus their tag properties are inaccessible. There are ways round it, but not ones my users find intuitive
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This is is one of those core problems which are rarely discussed and less obvious for new users. Some of them have a basement below, some don’t. Let’s assume there is one and try to think of problems that may occur if this gets changed. I can’t think of one, but may be it is obvious to you, Mark?
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Mark Nicoll
commented
Simpler steps to repeat:
1) Make a text object.
2) Group it
3) Direct-select itExpected behaviuor: The text object is selected, with all its properties visible in the appearance pannel, as it would be if there was more than one element in the group. The direct-select tool should never select groups unless the group itself has a stroke or fill to select.
Actual behaviuor: the group object is selected.
Impact: selection chaos: you don't know what you're going to get with the direct-select tool. Sometimes groups, sometimes art items.
