Possible bug when changing font and grouping

Could this be a bug in Pan X? I selected several text objects and changed their font size then tried to GROUP them but found the menu option greyed out. I deselected and then selected again and I was then able to group them. I was able to repeat this every time.

This action can be seen anytime you have one of the Text Editor Objects open for an object or objects in the Properties panel. Say you have two objects selected and you change the font, the Font Text Editor will remain open and the Group, UnGroup along with the sub-menus for the Arrange & Align items are all greyed out. If you tab to another Properties panel it will close the Font Text Editor and ungrey those items. I don’t know if this can be considered a bug or just “the way things work”.

On the Mac menu items can change depending on the context. When you click in an editable area in the properties panel, you are changing the context. Instead of being in the graphic editing context, you are now in the text editing context. So these commands aren’t available.

I was curious how other programs handle this, so I took a look at Keynote. Keynote does keep these menu items active when editing text in the properties panel. But I noticed, if you start editing the text in a property, then use a command like Group, Keynote discards the editing you’ve done to the property. That kind of seems like a bug to me. If Panorama did that, it could really be bad if you were doing something like editing a long formula or code, which then got discarded. On the other hand, saving the changes at that point could be problematic also. On balance, the way it works now isn’t perfect, but I think I can live with it.

That all makes sense Jim but all I was doing was changing the font size for all at once and couildn’t group unless I deselected and selected again.

If you use the Size entry box for the font in the Text pane or choose a size from the Popup Menu linked to it you are activating the size Text Editor Object and, therefore, the text editing menu items. Any one of the Properties Panel entry boxes will operate this way since they are all Text Editor Objects and must be closed before the normal form menus are available again. Clicking on one of the other Properties panes will deselect that Text Editor and change the menus back to their normal form state.

I think it would be desirable to have all these types of Properties Panel Text Editors be deactivated with a Return or Entry key press. I run across this behavior most often when I have made a change in the Properties Panel and then try to use the arrow keys to nudge the selected object to a new position. Like you noted, I would then have to deselect and re-select the object for the arrow keys to work.