Hello, I have a quick question which unfortunately I have not been able to find an answer for in the user manual. Why is it that sometimes beats get indented and then it is impossible to remove the indentation? In the image below the three lower beats are not subordinate to the first one, and I have not been able to figure out how to remove that indentation. I have moved them out of the group, moved them to the left, move them out and back again, and nothing seems to work. Any help will be greatly appreciated! Thanks!
It’s a bug I think. You can re set it back if you move the beats above the first or just degroup everything and make another group.
Thank you, yup I am doing that, not a big problem. Hopefully it will get fixed soon.
Hi,
The indentation happens when there’s something in-between on another track. The question is what, and with the size of the indentation, it looks like there’s something hidden on the timeline that’s being treated as different enough that we have to indent.
To be clear, indentation is supposed to happen when there’s something legitimately happening elsewhere, but that doesn’t seem to be the case here.
I’ve seen this myself a few times, but I can’t identify what the pattern is. Help us by answering these questions:
- Does the indent go away with a document reload?
- Is there anything in particular that seems to have triggered it?
Right, when I do indent things on purpose everything works very well. When it chooses to do it on its own, then it becomes a bit problematic. The indent does not go away with a document reload. I sometimes have to recreate the group or create a duplicate beat outside of the group, and then move it inside and remove the other one. I have not been able to discover what exactly produces that behaviour but if I find out, I will definitely post it here. Thanks!
Hi,
To be clear, they’re not indents, even if they look like it. They’re gaps because something is happening somewhere else. If you place a beat outside the group, but arrange it to be in-between the items in the group, gaps will be made around it to show that the group isn’t continuous.
Since the problem doesn’t survive a document reload, it’s not something in the data, but instead something runtime, which actually makes it hard unless we stumble into steps to reproduce it, because debugging the layout algorithm produces so much logging that you can’t run with it enabled for long. So this is more of a heads up that this may take some time, unless we get an insight.
What we’re looking for is what kind of item is in between the two beats in the group that have been spaced apart, and the layout algorithm thinks that this item is real enough that it merits a spacer. I do have a couple of things to check.
Ah that is very interesting, I was not looking at it that way but as some bug that created the indent. Now I will look for separators, because I did insert several separators from the Final Draft document, to rearrange it. If I discover what kind of workflow produces that, I will let you know.
Hi,
To be clear, we’re definitely looking for some kind of ghost, because it goes away with a reload.
Basically, we only allow items to be stacked vertically in a group if there’s nothing intervening. If anything intervenes, we force a gap so that there’s room for the intervening thing, like a beat outside the group.
So the question is what is considered intervening. We do have things that are technically on the timeline, even though you can’t seem them, for example an empty group. Since an empty group doesn’t have beats, we instead anchor it in a spot that might technically be between those two beats, even though you can’t see it.
We’re supposed to ignore those, but let’s suppose that we actually see things as intervening that really aren’t (like an anchor or multiple anchors), then we would draw the gap even though you can’t see anything there. The only problem is that this would survive a document reload. But we might have a stray anchor cleanup, which I’ve forgotten everything about, so I need to get back into it.
So what we’re really looking for is what USED to be in that gap, because it seems to linger for layout purposes. But this is the area we’re searching in.
Per
Got it, I will pay attention and let’s see if I can pinpoint the issue. Thank you!
Hi,
To be clear, I do think there is a bug, because I’ve seen it myself. But then it didn’t happen again. We’re of course already handling all the items to ignore between beats in order to allow them to be continuous in a group, but we must be missing something.