#156 selecting single strokes

[Niklas Beisert]

With the given tools it is sometimes hard to impossible to select a single stroke (which you might want to delete or change). Currently the selection box and lasso require the stroke to be entirely within the region. For drawing sketches there may be other strokes which are contained in this region, and those cannot be unselected.

I'd like to propose an inclusive version of the selection tools (box and lasso). One which selects any stroke that passes through the region. Checking if any of the vertices of a stroke lies within the regions may not be sufficient in some cases (long straightened lines), but would work as a first approximation.

[Denis Auroux]

I agree with your comment that it's sometimes hard to select exactly what one wants, but wouldn't the behavior you propose be just as problematic, and even less intuitive? I am trying to imagine the selection catching anything that passes through the region and I feel that it would be very confusing to most users.

Perhaps the right algorithm is: use the current method and, if that doesn't select anything, look for the "most likely" stroke that passes through the selection region and select just that one? (not sure what "most likely" should be) ? In some sense this is already done with text and image boxes -- if you just click in one of those, it gets selected.

Denis

[Niklas Beisert]

Thanks for your reply. I agree that it would not be a good idea to change the default behaviour. But I could imagine an option (like the shape or ruler option for drawing) that determines whether the selection is picky, greedy or perhaps something in between (e.g. select any stroke that has been captured by 50%). A fallback option may also be useful, but I'm not sure it would work in all cases.

Another idea I had was to introduce a tool that operates much like the eraser, but instead of erasing parts of strokes, it selects any stroke touches.

This tool would probably work best if ctrl-select would add to the current selection. Then perhaps there would be no need to modify the exisiting tools.

Niklas