Direct Selection Tool no longer working as usual
When using the Direct Selection Tool to make a selection within another object via click and drag, the tool automatically selects the outer object, regardless of its fill setting.
In previous versions of Illustrator, it would not select such an object if it had no fill, which made it easy to select multiple paths and points that were contained within an object with a simple click and drag gesture. Now, this is rendered impossible and makes the tool much more tedious to use.
This absolutely needs to be fixed!
David Castillo
shared this idea
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Ah, I see what is happening. Rectangles and ellipses have center points, which count as a part of a path. If they get marqueed, it makes the them fully selected. There is no way to disable this behaviour, and there is no way to not display centerpoints by default, but you can always disable them for already drawn shaped by pressing a special button in the Attributes panel.
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whstlblwr
commented
This happens to me too.
If there is multiple objects inside of a rectangle with no fill and I attempt to select all the objects by dragging a box around them, then the rectangle is also selected IF my box goes around where the centre of the rectangle is. You know on the bounding box how there is a square in each corner and one in the middle? If you drag the box around where the middle square would be for the rectangle then it gets selected. I don't know what that middle square is even for.
I'm on Illustrator 25.0.1 for Mac and I am fairly confident that it still worked properly in v24.x.
Anyways, it's annoying having to do the extra step of deselecting the rectangle, but it's even more painful when you don't notice that theres an extra object selected and you make changes to it only to have to roll them back and deselect.
It's absurd to change such a fundamental behaviour which has existed since at LEAST CS5, but to change it and not have a setting to revert back, is unconscionable.
If I wanted the rectangle selected, i would simply drag the box slightly further to include it in the selection, it couldn't be any simpler. I can't imagine any scenario where this change in behaviour would save anyone a measurable abount of time or effort.
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David, does not happen to me...
Can you record a short video and provide the file that has this bug?
