After Merge boxes are polygons

beacon1993

Hello
I had a shape in my layer (2) and wanted to turn it into one, so I used the merge function under the layer edit.
Now I created a new layer (3) and wanted to draw a box and edit its properties. When I double klick the "polygon properties" open up. How can I acsess the normal "box properties" ?

Greetings

davidnhutch

It is true, Layer Merge changes boxes to polygons.

If you double-click and are seeing Polygon Properties then it is a polygon. There is no way to access the normal 'box properties' because it is no longer stored internally as a box

You could:

1. Don't use Merge on the whole layer. Just merge the shapes that you want. This can be done e.g. using Edit > Selection > Merge. And of course select other things, but don't select the boxes, prior to running that.
2. If you must Merge the whole layer for some reason, then you could write a script to convert the polygons back to boxes. It would go through each polygon and determine if it's a box shape, and if so it'd change its internal representation to be a true box, else it would ignore it.

There may be other options. If those options aren't good, let us know a bit more about what you're doing

David

beacon1993

Thanks !

Matthias

Hi all,

If you want to avoid turning a full layer into polygons, you can select the shapes you want to join and use "Edit/Selection/Merge" to merge just these shapes. Any non-selected shapes won't be touched.

In general, "merging" is an operation which is rarely used because if you just draw shapes in an overlapping or touching way, they will later on (on the mask) form a joined area so explicit merging is usually not required.

But maybe we both misunderstood the question. Maybe you meant you switched the "background combination mode" to "Merge". This is the button right of the ruler button in the toolbar. There is a "Merge" mode which behaves differently from the default "Add" mode. In "Merge" mode, the drawn shapes will be merged with any shapes touching or overlapping the drawn one. This will implicitly convert boxes to polygons. In that mode it may appear as if you're no longer able to draw a box. To enable true boxes again, just select the "Add" mode. BTW: what's even more confusing is if you choose "Erase" mode - then you won't see anything at all ...

Matthias