I have talked about it on this forum before, that it would be great if we could lock elements in a way that you would be able to see them and snap to them, but not select them. So instead of hiding these elements, you would "disable" them - still visible and snappable, but they are faded, and you cannot select them.
What happens a lot in our teamwork projects is when people try to copy and paste some things they often accidentally select some locked elements (e.g. grids, section markers, etc.) and end-up creating duplicates, or in some cases they go to unlock an element to delete it, but they accidentally also select a grid and delete that as well. Not only that, but in general, I want to have the grid there so that I can snap and refer to it, but I end up selecting them instead of the columns placed on them (and have to activate the column tool to be able to select them in the end). I could go on, but I am getting tired or typing.
Recently what I started to do (on top of the usual locking) is that I create a separate design option for these elements, I have these design options turned on for most combinations, and as long as people have the "Edit Default Only" and "Fade Environment" options ticked in the Design Options palette, they can see the grids faded out, they can snap to them, but they cannot select them. Exactly what I wanted!
But the problem is that I cannot rely on all users having these options ticked at all times (and in some cases they might actually need to turn them off to work properly).
What I would love if in the Design options palette, I could have some other icons next to each option other than visibility (kinda like in the layer dialog). If I could not only toggle visibility for these options, but also the "Fading" and the "Editability/Selectability", then I could essentially "disable" a few options at a time in every combination, while the rest of the options remain untouched.
Open