Stokestack

Which totally defeats the purpose of having a variable... and defeats the purpose of this whole dialog. I can't believe that's the intentional design.

Hi all. I'm performing a very common task: exporting a bunch of PNGs to use as button icons in iOS. I have four versions of the button for the various states it can be in, and an export slice for each. The slices are named appropriately: enabled, enabled_on, disabled, disabled_on. I use this file as a template. When I export, I want all the filenames to start with the name of the button. In the output-filename dialog, you can create a user variable; one would think this is exactly the type of situation you'd want one for. But the user variable doesn't show up anywhere else: Is this a known bug? This is Designer 1.8.4 under Mac OS 10.15.6.

Thanks, but that only changes the one name. Try it. If you type something in there, it won't be reflected in any other output filenames. That's the point of a user variable: You can change its value in one place, and all of the output filenames that include the variable will change accordingly. At least... that's how it should work. It appears to be broken in Designer, because the user variable isn't made available to you after you define it. In my screen shot above, I created a variable called "base_name" and set it to be "native". If I insert base_name at the beginning of every output name field, every output filename start with "native". Next time, if I change my design and want to give all of the outputs a different name, I should just be able to change base_name to "something else", and all the output filenames will start with "something else."

I set up a template for GUI buttons, with versions of a button in all of its potential states. In my Export persona, I have each as a slice, exporting all three necessary resolutions for iOS. But I don't see any way of setting a base filename, and then appending the slice name to it. The Export persona lets you set up a "user variable" for export filenames... but then doesn't show it anywhere except where you defined it. Is this a bug?

I just set up a four-way template, but found one potentially annoying aspect of the Symbol functionality: If you make one copy invisible in the layer list, they all become invisible. While this might occasionally be useful, I think it would be annoying as hell at least as often. Is this configurable?

Thanks, guys. And thanks for taking the time to put that together, Garry. I haven't used symbols before, but the synchronous changing of the text is great.

Thanks for the reply. I guess that's basically "no," but I can't say I'm surprised. I guess my best option is to duplicate this thing three times, move the dupes into their own quadrants, and then make four slices: one per quadrant.

I'm warming up to the Export persona idea, finding it pretty decently implemented for exporting icons for application development. I'm not sure how best to set up the export of variations of, for example, a button. A button can typically have four states enabled enabled and selected disabled disabled and selected This sometimes calls for four different bitmaps or SVGs. In the example graphic below, the only difference between the four versions is the white outline (which disappears when the button isn't "selected" or on), and the opacity of the whole image (50% when disabled). I'd like to avoid making four copies of this thing. Can I set up slices that only include certain layers? Then I could have the outline on a layer that I can exclude from one export, then have a 100% opacity layer that I can exclude from others. Or maybe there's a better way. Suggestions welcomed!

Why should we need to crop something, switch tools, select all pixel layers while carefully omitting vector layers, and do another operation? When I crop something, I mean it. Period.

The Crop tool is not layer-specific.

Thanks, but I don't want to rasterize text or other vector content, and I don't want to have to do an additional step every time.

And those are only two of them. How many times does this common feature have to be requested? It can't be that hard to implement, given that invisible layers already don't print. It's an extra boolean. If that's hard to add to your object model and serialization, this product is dead already, Serif. Can't figure out how to add the control to the layer list? Fine: For now, just put it in the context menu, at least. And one day aspire to enhance that with a "no-print" icon in the layer-list cell. And someday, when the technology becomes available, put a button in there with a little printer icon. But of course, that means the unlabeled, nondescript checkbox that's there today will need some love. Hey, how about making that look like an eye!

I cropped an image with the Crop tool, then expanded the canvas to make room for another image. Lo and behold, the cropped-away portions of the image reappeared. I don't want this. I understand there might be some scenario when you want to retain surrounding image data; but since there's a dedicated Crop tool in the palette, it would be nice to have a variant of it that crops destructively.

Thanks, but that sounds like a recipe for accidentally wrecking your vector elements. Not to mention it's still an annoying extra step, which fuses two unrelated functions together (and destructively, at that).

Sure, but what if there are vector elements?

Thanks! So you're forced to rasterize?

When resizing the canvas, I never want to resize it proportionally. Yet I have to deselect the "lock" between the dimensions every damned time.

Hi all. I cropped an image with the Crop tool, then expanded the canvas to make room for another image. Lo and behold, the cropped-away portions of the image reappeared. I don't want this. Is there a really-crop-this tool? Thanks!

When using templates, you often don't want the template to print. I can find no way to mark a layer as non-printing in Designer. I would expect to see this in the layer list. Thanks!

Don't come at me with your aggressive COMMON SENSE, man! 😁

Thanks. That's somewhat reasonable, and it does change when you fill the object: Then the snapping will work when you hover anywhere over its interior. I expected the snapping to apply the same logic to identify candidates as it does to perform the snapping itself. What if two objects' outlines entirely overlap? Well, it's not supposed to. In this case it did, but I'm out of time for this particular investigation. Maybe activating that feature caused an iteration over the candidate collection that cleared out erroneous entries. Only the developer can say.

Thanks for the reply and the reference. I see that the default snapping mode is "Candidate List," with a limit of six candidates. I've encountered two problems with this functionality just now. 1. Simply the act of toggling "Show snapping candidates" has caused even partial snapping to the label box to stop working for all objects. But I guess it wasn't supposed to be working anyway... 2. The documentation says that an object becomes a candidate if you hover over it, but as you can see in the original video, the non-snapping label does not become a candidate despite ample time moving the text around on top of it. Only the three text boxes are shown as snapping candidates for each other now.

Hi all. I wanted to lay out some labels using a template. I found that the snapping of my paragraph text object to each label was inconsistent: In some places there's no snapping, in others there's one-dimensional snapping, and finally in others there's two-way snapping. Any idea why? Screen grabs attached. Designer 1.8.3 under Mac OS 10.15.5. Thanks! arbitrarySnapping.mov

Good observation, and that's how Photoshop handles this. While I would never hold Photoshop out as a clinic on good UI, their raw-photo "development" procedure is very clearly modal and conveys to the user that until it's applied, you can't do any "normal" editing on the image.

Thanks for the reply. I just pulled up the original, and it looks like this was at 100%. I'm not sure what I did immediately previous to this, because I don't get the same result now. But if you look before and after the application of the filter, the shadow direction is drastically different. The black outline along the hand, for example. It's hard to see how changes this drastic could be the result of zoom level, but in this case it doesn't look like that was the issue.