Not global colors

[aleale1]

Can anyone explain to me: why do I need to have the not global colors in a document and what it’s benefit over the global colors?!

As I see it, the existence of not global colors just makes life harder.

[fde101]

I suspect the option of having non-global colors in a document palette is provided largely to allow for more consistent behavior with the other palette types, which do not support global colors at all (for practical reasons).  Note that this has been discussed previously multiple times on other threads.

[aleale1]

6 hours ago, fde101 said:

the other palette types, which do not support global colors at all

Can you give an example of this? Anyway, InDesign is doing pretty well without non-global colors.

[MikeW]

20 minutes ago, aleale1 said:

Can you give an example of this? Anyway, InDesign is doing pretty well without non-global colors.

All swatches one creates in ID or QXP are what Serif calls global colors.

[fde101]

6 hours ago, aleale1 said:

Can you give an example of this?

Anything on an application or system palette.  This would include all of the palettes that come bundled with the application.

[garrettm30]

The system palette are a good example (which I think are Mac-only, if I remember correctly) where global does not fit. Those palette are managed outside of Affinity.

There may be some technical reason why we need non-global swatches as a possibility. Unlike InDesign, all of the Affinity apps have to share the ability to work directly with (manipulate) raster graphics. The idea of a global color as an object attribute makes sense, but the idea of a global color as a pixel attribute does not as much. There, I would think that swatches merely serve as a starting point for raster values.

Perhaps it is technically possible, but it would complicate the various kind of pixel operations if it had to keep track of some tag linked to a global color value per pixel despite the many kinds of raster operations that happened to each pixel since the global color was applied.

That's just a thought, almost just to raise the question more than to state an undeniable fact. I mentioned that InDesign, though it supports placing of raster assets of course, does not need to directly manipulate them. But what about PhotoShop as a comparison, since it is raster-focused but also has some object-type elements like text? It has been so long since I used it, so I really don't remember, nor do I know what it can do in recent or even not-so-recent versions. My last version of PhotoShop was "PhotoShop CS" (that is, in retrospect we might call it CS 1). I would not be surprised if it now has the option of global colors for its various smart objects, but don't the swatches usually work in a non-global way, at least when painting to pixels?

[fde101]

On 5/29/2020 at 9:59 AM, garrettm30 said:

Perhaps it is technically possible, but it would complicate the various kind of pixel operations if it had to keep track of some tag linked to a global color value per pixel despite the many kinds of raster operations that happened to each pixel since the global color was applied.

What you are describing is what is sometimes referred to as an indexed color scheme - very common back when video adaptors on computers could only display a handful of colors at the same time (16 colors was common at one point, later 256, ...).

Depending on the nature of the operation being performed this could actually make it a bit more efficient as the colors in the palette could be operated on instead of the image data itself.

However, this would not be even remotely practical for photographic data.

[Petar Petrenko]

On 5/28/2020 at 6:07 PM, MikeW said:

All swatches one creates in ID or QXP are what Serif calls global colors.

And they have it from the very beggining. I wonder why Affinity decided to include static/standard colors, anyway? Or those sets of Swatches and Grays? Does anybody use them at all? Swathes shoud be empty for us to save our global colors only.

[MikeW]

Yes, and I railed on about how swatches work after the first time I started AD.

For AD & APub, there should be a switch in Preferences that one could turn on. Something like "Hey, always create Global swatches like every other application unless I choose not to," or something along those lines 😀.

[Petar Petrenko]

3 minutes ago, MikeW said:

For AD & APub, there should be a switch in Preferences that one could turn on. Something like "Hey, always create Global swatches like every other application unless I choose not to," or something along those lines 

This leads to complicating things that are already complicated. Removing them completelly will be simplier and the apps will lose some weight, at the end. It will be part of fight toward bloatware.