Prototype Linking / Problems

Hey there,

i have some problems / suggestions to improve the Prototyping-Function.

  • The destination-selection for interations is very time consuming an frustrating. Instead of just showing the main parent-boards, like in Figma, it shows ALL boards in the file. Without a search-function its really tedious to find the right main-board to link. (The Dropdown is also not that wide, so longer names cant be read.)

  • Link main-boards via drag & drop is also a problem if the target parent-board uses flex-layout or fullwidth content-frames. Its not possibe to drag the destination-arrow to the whole parent-board, because it always selects the content-frames inside. Maybe its a solution to drag to the board-name-label on top

  • When viewing a prototype with linked elements like buttons & overlays, its not reasonable possible to navigate with the arrow-keys between the main-boards, because ALL linked elements are also marked as “show in prototype” and are visible in the Boards-Overview when viewing the prototype.

With that behavior, a client that views a prototype of a website / app sees ALL boards & elements that are linked, in the boards-overview in prototype-view. (If the arrows keys are used to cycle through the screens, also all linked elements like buttons etc. are shown separatly.)

It would be nice if, like in figma, only the main parent-boards are shown in the prototype-overview.
(I think it was like that in earlier penpot-versions?)

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Hello @72dpigraphics

This is something I 100% agree with you and we’ve been reporting for a while now. The view mode of Penpot and the prototype mode needs refinement. As of right now, is the worst part of the whole Penpot experience, but it isn’t broken (that’s why I think Penpot devs are not actively working on this, but maybe they are, idk).

About the boards showing up in view mode when you link interactions to them, I think that is a bug, because before v2.0 I’ve never noticed such behavior. Maybe this is something that can be fixed quick.

Here some previous discussions for you to read if you are interested:

Hi everyone! Thank you for reporting this issue and I’m sorry for the delay in getting back.

However, I’m happy to confirm that the team is on it and in the process of applying a fix! Hopefully we will be able to get this sorted out fairly soon.

1 Like