Move to front of group (Text)

[GordC]

It appears that one can “move to front of group” in Text default even though the radio button doesn’t remain checked. It seems it is the only way it will work. This function worked perfectly in Pro 8. Why was it changed in Pro 9???

[Dermot Dempsey]

There are two separate ways to control the drawing order of objects. You can specify that an object will be drawn in specific "drawing group" or you can modify the order that it is drawn within it's current group.

In Home Designer Pro, you can change which drawing group is used to draw an object. There are 3 separate drawing groups for CAD based objects, front, back, and normal. An object that is changed to draw in the back group will draw before all other normal objects. An object that is changed to draw in the front group will draw after all other normal objects. Whan an object is drawn in it's normal group, the program will determine the best drawing order. The drawing group is an attribute of an object and it will be remembered for that object when it has been modified.

I believe all Home Designer products also allow you to change the drawing order of a specific object within it's current drawing group by using the Move to Front of Group tool. This tool simply puts the object at the end of the list of objects so that it will draw on top of the other objects in the list.

The Move to Front of Group tool is really an action that is performed on a specific object rather then an attribute that is saved with an object. For the Version 9 Home Designer products you will notice that it appears as a toolbar button on the Edit toolbar when an object is selected. It also appears as a checkbox in some dialogs. The reason the checkbox does not stick is because it is not an attribute that is stored with the object. When you check the box and click OK to close the dialog box, the drawing order is then changed. It is probably faster and easier to use the edit tool then it is to use the checkbox but we kept the checkbox around so that people upgrading would still be able to find it. It is likely that we will remove the checkbox from furture versions so you might want to get in the habit of using the new edit tool.

The checkbox for Move to Front of Group should not be in the text defaults because it can't perform this action on the text defaults. This is a bug and hopefully it will be fixed in a future version. For now, you can safely ignore it.

[GordC]

Thank you Dermot.

You explained it very well.