Hidden elements are visible

I don’t know if this has already been mentioned here:

In previous versions of Web Designer Premium, when an element was hidden (made invisible) in the Page & Layer Gallery, it was for purposes of preview and export not there. It was a convenient way to compare previews with and without a given element. (The main exception, of course, was when an entire layer was hidden: it appeared on export.)

In version 17 (I didn’t check v16), the element is hidden from the design project only. When the project is previewed or exported, the hidden element appears as a normal element. The only way to “hide” it is to delete it. That is not only risky, given that one must remember to undelete it afterwards, but it is problematic, in that if one wants to hide several elements and then pick and choose which to keep, it is a nightmare of deleting and undeleting back and forth.

Please fix the problem and make hidden elements invisible in export and preview once again. Thanks.

None of this sounds right and is not happening this way for me.

The only time a hidden Layer will export its elements is when is is set up as a pop-up layer. Nothing shows until that layer is activated.
Well there is one. If you have placed a bang at the front of a Layer Name (e.g., "!I'm hiding").

Try running v17 as administrator the one time.

If all else fails, upload a test design here.

Acorn

@ Acorn - you explained in another post a while back about soft-grouping across different layers.

I think it remains true that if you soft-group one object with another, whether on the same or a different layer, then intentionally or otherwise, make one visible and hide the other, both become visible in preview and both export.

You cannot tell (as far as I know) from the Page & Layer that you have a soft group, so it is possible in this specific scenario to believe you have made an object hidden, but it appears visible because it is a member of soft-group with at least one visible object.

The corollary in this instance is maybe to check whether the object that is hidden is soft-grouped with another that is visible. Not an issue for a group.

Just a thought.

Gary

Gary, thank you. Can you locate the Thread? I think your point is not accurate. If I did then it is wrong but I need the context.
I know of about half a dozen methods of hiding or forcing hidden objects to be visible, which I use to good effect in my designs.
Others stumble into them without recalling how. Back-tracking is never easy.

Soft-grouped shapes do not present as different until any one is selected then all members are also selected.
You best see this when Locate is active in the Page & Layer gallery.
The soft-group detail also appears in the Status Line.
You have to actively look for them.

What I have done in the past is add another marker into the Soft-Group and keep it off-page in a list of Soft-Groupings.
it is the equivalent of finding the needle in the haystack by burning the haystack and converting the search from 3D to 2D.

Or just force the marker to stay invisible at all times.
One method, at its simplest, is to add <div></div> to Placeholder Body HTML (code)).

Acorn

@ Acorn - your comments were generally about soft-grouping over a number of different threads, all of which have been helpful to me and not related to my observation.

Apologies if I have confused this thread with my own observation. I discovered what I thought was an issue with soft-grouping and highlighted it as a possible reason for a hidden object to appear visible.

I could replicate the issue I described, but I too may be doing something wrong? I created two objects, soft-grouped them, and hide one. The hidden object correctly disappears from view in the editor, but when previewed appears in situ.

Attachment 127056

Gary

Thanks to all who have responded.

After reading your suggestions, I ran the program as administrator with no change in the result. I did find that some items can in fact be hidden. (By the way, I don’t use soft groups at all).

I have experimented a bit, and I think I figured out the problem. I am using placeholders for references to graphic files that I do not want to be exported as png/jpg by the software. (They are svg graphics and work better). Long story short… apparently, the software cannot ignore a placeholder that contains an external image reference, even if it is hidden. So, they continue to show up in the preview even when made invisible in the project.

I’ll just have to keep that in mind as I go forward.

Thanks again for the advice.

Yup, another Xara muck-up.

@Xara - Bug - In v17.0, hiding a Soft-Group object fails to hide the shape on Preview; it is hidden on the design page.

In my mind this is the hardest one to justify when you have lots of Objects you are un/hiding. Better to add into a Layer that is presently hidden as unhiding a Layer is easier than unhiding scores of Objects.
But we all have different workflows.

Moving and returning an Object to a layer destroys the detail of where it was in the Layer hierarchy.
Moving a Soft-Grouped Object is not that easy either.

Until this is resolved can you not select the soft-grouped objects and with Rotation Handles selected, set the Rotation Origin to the top left corner and then Flip the objects off the page?

Acorn

Thanks for the confirmation Acorn.

I agree completely with your suggestion on using layers for hidden objects, but I could see how someone might end up in a soft-group tangle with this bug.

@gcellison

Quote:

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Long story short… apparently, the software cannot ignore a placeholder that contains an external image reference, even if it is hidden. So, they continue to show up in the preview even when made invisible in the project.

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You could place the geo-reference placeholder(s) on their own layer for each page. Where you wanted to have them appear individually, they would be on their individual layers. When the layer is hidden they should not appear, when visible they should.

I would have thought this should work.

Thanks @Gary and @Acorn,

I will give the idea a shot. Moving the objects to a dedicated layer is not ideal, but it definitely beats the delete / undo routine.

Thanks again.

Quote:

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I figured out the problem. I am using placeholders for references to graphic files that I do not want to be exported as png/jpg by the software. (They are svg graphics and work better). Long story short… apparently, the software cannot ignore a placeholder that contains an external image reference, even if it is hidden. So, they continue to show up in the preview even when made invisible in the project.

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Try the attached. It loads svg's on different layers and they aren't visible until the button opens that layer. (Like all other things on pop-up layers [jpg. gif, png etc.] they are all loaded on page load but just not visible)