Whats teh best way to go about shifting objects down a page to make room for a new one? Consider in Word, you need to insert a paragraph or line… place the cursor where you want it… and the whole document shift down to make space as you go.
I find this very difficult to do in Sparkle. I’ll layout a page with say, a dozen objects… then realize I need to insert an element halfway down the page… I have to struggle to shift select all the elements following, zoom out, drag them down… then back up, then back down till I get the positioning I like.
If I have to extend the size of that inserted element… I have to through that shift-selecting again, drag them down… ad nauseam
I feel like I’m missing some essential tip on how to do this efficiently.
I’ve had similar situations while building websites … with many objects on one page that I had to move around.
What I do nowadays while arranging objects: I build groups of elements, groups that seem logical to me when looking at the design. Then you can move the whole group and you don’t have to select separate objects all the time.
Would love to see a solution here!
I still remember the solution that Adobe Muse had… you’d select the element on the page and then on the left-hand side you had a “scrubber” which you clicked and grabbed and then anything alongside the element, and underneath the selected element, in one motion I would drag down the page.
Hey Shadowfax, thanks and yes, I’ve been using grouping, a bit of a clunky workaround because its another step… group, move, ungroup. And it seems that grouping causes problems with same elements on the other devices - certain attributes dont seem to refresh till you ungroup.
Feel like I’m spending a lot of time fighting the software. I know its because I’m relatively new to it - but I really think it needs some sort of global object management system - that would go a long way.
Even finding all the elements you want to group can be difficult, especially if they’re the same color and overlapping as is the case with the current site I’m working on. I wish there was some way to turn on outlines for all objects - just so I can see where they are.
I suggested the adobe muse solution to Duncan a few years ago. If you come to Sparkle from Indesign or Muse you can easily get into the hang of moving objects to make room, you dont need to group and ungroup but you have to select the objects in a group of course and just move them around. With Sparkle I’ve found you can select a group of objects faster from the bottom up rather than from the top.
My main tip for this would be to try different zoom levels in order to easily select multiple objects that are not all visible. I have some very long pages to maintain, and will often ⌘-[minus/plus] to grab a lot of objects, beginning to drag out a rectangle from outside the page width area.
Sparkle is great at clearly showing the selected objects at all magnification levels, so it’s easy to ⌘-[click] to deselect any that don’t need to be moved. After starting to drag them, hold down the shift key to constrain them to the vertical axis only.
Also, use the shift key with the arrow keys to move the selected objects in larger increments.
I have the same struggle. I now try different lay-outs for my FCPX training material. Visually the best is to work with 2 columns. 1 for text and 1 for images, when inserting text I can move multiple images. It would be nice that Sparkle would have the same editing behaviour as Pages. When I insert text then all below (text and images) move.
