Hi there! I started using Vectornator a few months ago and I’ve noticed I particularly struggle to use the alignment tools. I used to the larger variety of actions available in Inkscape for alignment and distribution but I figured I could adjust.
However, sometimes, the distribution tools just appear to not work at all. Take the images below as an example. Each of the words in “Abuse & Recovery” are separate text boxes, so that I could have more detailed control over the size. I wanted to horizontally distribute these three text boxes. This is what it looks like before I hit the horizontal distribute button.
But after I hit it, you can see very clearly by the borders of the text boxes that these are not distributed equally! Other times, I’ve done this and two of the text boxes are actually overlapping while there is a huge gap between the other two.
Am I doing something wrong? I would really like to be able to use these tools instead of attempting to distribute them evenly by eye.
You are not doing anything wrong. Alas, it is working as designed.
Equal distribution is defined as equal distances between the centres of the objects’ bounding boxes, not equal spacing between the outsides of the objects (some vector apps have a separate equal spacing option which would do what you want, but Vectornator does not have that function at this time).
If you were to mark the distance form the middle of the “Abuse” box to the middle of the “&” box, and from the middle of the “&” box to the middle of the “Recovery” box, the distances would be the same.
However, because the word lengths are different (roughly 4 letters versus 2.5 letters to the middle of the word), the gap between the external limits/edges of the boxes is different.
A possible solution is to use one text box for the entire “Abuse & Recovery” line, then use spaces to define the distance between the elements on that line. This is, of course, limited to space-sized steps to define the distance.
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Thanks for the answer. That is one thing I really miss about Inkscape is their options for distribution were much more detailed and specific. So you could choose between equally distributing the way you describe, or having the spaces between bounding boxes equal etc. Alas, Inkscape hasn’t kept up with mac updates and their current beta version is so buggy as to be unuseable.
The main reason I opted to have separate text boxes here is because Vectornator makes it extremely difficult to have different text sizes within the same bounding box. It’s not impossible to do but I found if I made one wrong click, it would switch the entire text box to the same size, even if only one word was selected.
