Align: Distribute Horizontal/ Vertical centers Buttons on Ai/iD/Ps are misleading

[celia_3512]

Hi, I have a suggestion to make to the devs,


I think the Distribute Horizontal/ Vertical centers button is very misleading, why do I say this? Because even thought I can understand the "center"of the squares being vertical and horizontal, The lines that stick out of the square are wrong. Distribute Horizontal Centers has Vertical lines sticking out, and Distribute Vertical Centers has horizontal lines sticking out. At first I thought I was crazy, but it is actually misleading when you're in a hurry and all you see is the lines. I think the squares kind of make sense but the lines showing the constraints don't. Horizontal is side-by-side, and thats absolutly correct, and vertical is one on top of the other, but the lines are super misleading, making me confused for no reason at all. I think this  should be changed because the lines that are sticking out are not the correct orientation. Idk maybe im stupid but it seems like it makes more sense like that...

Distribute top edges and Bottom Edges makes sense thought, i agree with that, but when its the middle its definitly misleadig from a immediate logical visual sense. Maybe im barking at the wrong tree and this is nit picking, but of all my years using adobe products this has always been the confusing question in my head, so Im just putting it out there, if someone can Ai explain to me why the way it is makes sense, I'd like that.

Thanks, have a good day!

Gui.

[celia_3512]

Has soon has I posted it I realised what it means, so it makes sense when you are using more than one paragraph, however the point is that the lines sticking out are horizontal when its vertical center, and the lines are vertical when its horizontal center and that is what I find misleading. But whatever, its not wrong, its just a bit confusing, sorry for the dumb question.

Bye!

[Abhishek Rao]

Hi @celia_3512,

Thanks for sharing your thoughts and for following up with the clarification. In InDesign, what you are seeing is expected behavior. The Distribute Horizontal Centers and Distribute Vertical Centers icons represent the axis along which object centers are distributed, not the stacking direction of the objects, which is why horizontal center distribution shows vertical guidelines and vertical center distribution shows horizontal guidelines.

That said, your feedback about the icons being visually confusing when working quickly is completely valid. If you would like the team to consider this, I recommend submitting it as a feature request on UserVoice, so it can be tracked and prioritized. For Illustrator, you can raise the Uservoice here: Adobe Illustrator and for Photoshop, you can also create post in their respective community: Photoshop ecosystem - Adobe Product Community and then submit feature requests from there.

Feel free to reach out if you have any questions or additional feedback.

Abhishek