Marque select one object within a soft group selects the whole soft group

I don't know if this is wrong or if it's supposed to work this way, but I find it odd.

Drag a bounding box around one object in a Soft Group and the entire Soft Group gets selected.
I'd expect the Soft Group to be ignored unless the entire Soft Group is within the marquee selection, like how a normal group behaves.

Attachment 125065

what is happening [i think] is that you are including one of the soft group objects in your marque selection - that will select the whole soft group, one of the ways soft groups differ - part of their 'softness' is the ability to select and move just one object in the group, and the rest goes with it

see post #4

Try Select inside; Control +left click.
Also check out Help>Editing text if you want to get to the text directly. Multiple clicks allow choice of word, line or paragraph.
HTH

I guess re-reading what I said its not that clear the difference..

a normal group is automatically stacked together - you need to marque it all to select - it is really one 'object'

a soft group does not have to be stacked together the objects can be anywhere, indeed the included objects can be on different layers - therefore in order to select them all you only need to select one [apart from anything else you can't select across layers in the normal way]

When you marquee select you are trying to get everything inside the marquee selection and ignore what's outside it, with Soft Groups it adds more.

I'm working on a website where there is a shadow underneath images and I've soft grouped the image and shadow together so the image itself exports as a JPG and the shadow as a PNG. When I try to marquee objects close to the Soft Group, I keep selecting the tiny shadow object and therefore the entire Soft Group. I keep expecting the Soft Group to be ignored in my selection.

I guess it's a minor annoyance, and it doesn't actually break anything on the page like some of the other stuff I've encountered.

My thoughts on it:

For a single click on a Soft Group, sure, select the Soft Group.
Shift click on the Soft Group? Go ahead and add it to the selection you already have.
With a marquee selection that isn't around the entire Soft Group I think it shouldn't get selected.

You guys think the entire Soft Group should get selected for a partial marquee selection just because one object happens to be inside the marquee?

Marquee select selects all objects. If one of those objects selected is a soft group, the entire soft group is included in the selection.

Fred C's solution is the way to select individual objects in a group or soft group.

If you need to edit the objects in a soft group, the simplest way to do this is remove the soft group. Make your changes and adjustments, then Apply Soft Group again.

yes - because this is one of the reasons for using a soft group as opposed to a normal group - though I am not looking at it from a website point of view...

I understand what you are saying - ie you do NOT want ANY of the soft group selected - maybe lock it first?

Soft Groups were designed to always select all members, on different layers, in Solo mode, locked or not. [Locking a Soft-Group all elements requires individual element selection].

Quote:

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Selecting one member of a Soft Group also selects all other members of the same Soft Group – even members that are on invisible or locked layers. This means when you delete, move, rotate or otherwise transform one member of a Soft Group, all the other members are similarly modified.

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I get round it by using the Page & Layer gallery and the Ctrl key. Not a great solution.

You can, however, also temporarily group a number of elements of a Soft-Group with Ctrl+Clicking as above and then Group (Ctrl+G). This decouples the elements so they are still in the Soft-Group and the selection of any other non-group element selects the whole Soft-Group but crucially a selection of the grouped elements only selects the sub-Group. This allows moving the Soft-Group, the sub-Group or any selected element independently. Just select the sub-Group and Ungroup (Ctrl+U) to restore the Soft-Group.

I think this help with partial marquee selections involving a Soft-Group.

Acorn

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Fred C

Try Select inside; Control +left click.
Also check out Help>Editing text if you want to get to the text directly. Multiple clicks allow choice of word, line or paragraph.
HTH

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You cannot Select Inside for more than one object in a Soft-Group.

Acorn

no thinking about it locking would not work of course silly me