Selective alignment

[Boldline]

Adding on to an earlier idea from a while back about selective alignment - the ability to customize what part of the object is used to align with the artboard or with another object.
I had first shared of at times I create shirt designs where the design is off-center intentionally; where the main text will be centered but a character or extra part of the design will extend out beyond the main design space. If I try to center it, it will want to center the entire design including the extended off-center part, not center it based on main wording while ignoring what extends beyond.

Working today with expanded text and needing to align them - I cannot rely on the live text to do it with use of the baseline because the text is all vector objects and it will align based on the top of letters like lowercase "L" and the lowest point in letters, like the lowercase "p"
Yes there are ways to do this already, but it would be nice to have a more automatic and accurate way in the future

Showing the extremities that can cause it to not align correctly with red lines - and showing a light blue box as a possible way to add a temporary height to align using so VS bypasses the extremities that may not be equal in all expanded words. Perhaps we would need a way to also do this to account for horizontal alignment as well?

[VectorStyler]

@Boldline There is an open feature request to use the font metric info (various heights) for snapping. I think this goes there.

[b77]

@Boldline It definitely can be done, I guess the more difficult part is the UI for this.

I thought that just Option-clicking the align button to align the text with the baseline instead of the descent line could work, but what do you do when you want to align them to the top, as there is the mean line (the x-height), the cap line, and the top/ascent line?

@vectoradmin Successive Option-clicking to cycle through the options?

[Boldline]

@b77 @vectoradmin Just clarifying my point - I was thinking of this in terms of aligning already expanded text and also non-text related things - groups of objects that do not all fit within the main shape to be aligned. I'm also excited for other options for live text alignment as well

I can put together some simple examples to show what I mean if that helps

[b77]

Keep in mind however that since some characters have overshoots (C, G, O, Q, S, U and maybe others go over the baseline and the mean or cap line, depending on the font), converted text has no font metrics and will align badly.

So it's better to keep text editable (unconverted) so the app can align by descender, baseline, mean line, cap line, etc.

But I get it that you didn't mean this only for text. Examples are welcome.

[Victor Vector]

I have identified this issue as well in my own designs. I would have to say that the majority of what am looking for is just baseline alignment and not bottom alignment. As @Boldline 's first example illustrates, one rarely wants text with descenders to align with the baseline of text containing no descenders.
As @b77 points out, the Align panel UI could be a bit of a nightmare to try and integrate text. The only thing I could think of was a text section in the Alignment Panel hamburger menu with check marks for the various options (descender, baseline, mean line, cap line, etc.,) and then text objects would align appropriately depending upon the option chosen from the main Alignment Panel.
Another place for this functionality would be in the Snapping Panel with a check box item for "Snap to Internal Text Metrics" or something like that.

I know this does not help for text converted to curves or other non-text related things as @Boldline mentioned... Perhaps some sort of special subpath snapping mode, where it responds to horizontal and vertical extrema of a subpath? Just spit-balling here...

[Boldline]

@b77 said in Selective alignment:

But I get it that you didn't mean this only for text. Examples are welcome.

I was more thinking of it for being able to choosing what section of a selection to align. Some designs we create are intentionally off-center - a small bit of text or design extends beyond the rest of the frame - but we don't want that extended part to be a factor in how the overall design is aligned on the artboard.

Here is an example from a few months back when I first brought it up.
Some of the secondary text extends beyond the main body of the design and if I was selecting the entire design to align, it would be off-center as a result of this