Ngaio9 wrote:

 

I'm new to Illustrator, what does the lasso tool do?

It doesn't do what you want that would be a good option if there were a way of invoking it with a keyboard toggle.

Th lasso tool does pretty much what one would expect it to do it selects any object or path that falls within the area you outline with the tool on the canvas so if the object is only partially in the area it will be selected.

It would be nice to have a toggle to select only objects that fall completely within the selection area or perhaps even something more sophisticated like settings for that fall within the selected area but only on the current layer or of  certain color fill as well,etc.

Only way to do what you want is to use the layer panel and that can be a bit blind sided. At least that I know of and of course an entirely different process than you desire.

I think this would be a helpful feature but zI would like it as a toggle rather than a change.

Say you want to select just the pink dots and not the blue ones, just drag round them like this with the lasso tool and they'll be selected on mouseup.

Marie wants to be able to do this, where the dotted line is your lasso selection.

I think the Lasso Tool would be a better place to put the feature rather than the direct select or the selection tool
as you can define a more random selection. and what would be great is if you could access the lasso tool when using
another tool with command l for the traditional way of selecting and option L for the way marie would also be able to select.

I bet if she visited the scripting forum she might get those guys on it and a script might work.Problem there is keyboard short cuts for scripts do not stick
so you might have to create an action invoking the script and assign keyboard to the action.

It is a very good feature and should be implemented.

What is a script? - the text below the screen shot, in post 11. It is a sequence of commands Illustrator reads and excutes accordingly.

What and where is the Adobe ExtendScript Toolkit - a program to create/edit scripts. It comes with Illustrator, it should be in the adobe folder neighborhood.

Save what with a meaningful name. - the script

Doubleclick where and on what? - on the saved script

Does this then create a button or keystroke command in Illustrator? - it adds a menu item in Illustrator under, File->Scripts menu

Does it change the actual marquee? - no, you draw the "marque" with the Rectangle Tool

Michael we'll keep waiting another decade, in the meantime, the script does the job.

cool, thanks Larry

Marie, maybe the problem is in what you actually saved,

you should have copied starting here

#target Illustrator
 
//  script.name = selectWithinRect.jsx;

then all the way down to

               return "true";
          else
               return "false";
     }

nothing else, is that what you copied?

Message was edited by: CarlosCanto

hahaha, it's only been what? 23 years of waiting....

JETalmage wrote:

 

This is the way Claris CAD, Freehand, Canvas, VectorWorks, etc. have worked and always worked.

 

FreeHand (sensibly) provides a tool-specific option for contact-sensitve selection. Double-click the selection tool and choose whether it selects objects merely touched, or only objects fully-enclosed.

 

Just one tiny part of the general tedium of Illustrator's selection/manipulation interface. Basic stuff that all competing programs do better.

 

JET

I would be opposed t this approach I would rather have a toggle I think preference is fine for a default setting but not as the only way of accessing your preference a toggle is better and I think the current behavior in AI is fine as the default. And to go further the use of the toggle and the setting of the default should be user defined.

that is the toggle should be on by default but the user can turn it off if for some reason.

This is one of the reasons I think the approach like other applications as a reason onto itself is misguide, who cares what other applications do or do not do as part of their mechanism. As long as a feature or an enhancement  or improvement of a feature is well thought out then that is al that counts.

As far as I can tell most users that use Illustrator use by choice by a vast majority changing the functions of Illustrator to match other programs that Illustrator user have rejected doesn't make much sense.

I started out with FreeHand and didn't like it I own a license to Corel's Suite for the Mac and did not like it, besides the fact that it constantly crashed.

I chose Illustrator because I got my work done, it worked for me.

I think the what is rudimental in other programs should be of no concern of Illustrator uses.

The new clipping mask behavior was ill conceived there should be a choice of how one wants the clipping mask feature work. And the same here it would be a very thoughtless act to dump one behavior for another with out thinking of the options and the needs of the vast majority of users.

I writing this here just in case someone from Adobe thinks this is a much requested feature, which it is not, but just in case they should think twice about suggesting the change.

The Contact Sensitive setting in FH is "a toggle" (a checkbox, to be exact). It is not a general preference setting. If you really had even a working familiarity with FH, you'd know that.

You need to loose your over-sensitive adversion to any mention of FH. Adobe now OWNS FreeHand. Therefore, it does not have to worry about any copyright infringement when copying interface features from FH.

And I have never said that every FH advantage (of which there are many) should necessarily be implemented exactly as it is in FH. The functionality is what's needed. But even when trying to do that, the results fall short because Illustrator is continually hindered by its stubborn adherance to more basic inferior interface schemes upon which the new functionality is dependent. Examples include the inferior (and decades-late) implementations of aligning anchorPoints, cutting multiple anchorPoints, and extension/retraction of handles.

JET