Synchronize Defaults Not Working

[thomaso]

According to this Help article it should be possible to set properties of a currently selected object as default, temporarily for the current document by using "Synchronize Defaults":

But I experience the "Synchronise defaults from selection" button not remember my selected properties, for instance of a selected text frame:

• When using then "Revert defaults" the application defaults get assigned – the app's saved defaults have not been overridden and the recently synchronized don't get assigned.
• When then creating a new text frame it has not the defaults assigned (neither saved nor synchronised) but the style of another, recently set object property, which I had neither synchronized nor saved as default. This can be a helpful behavior – unless I want to make use of synchronised defaults.

 

[Gabe]

Hey @thomaso,

Thanks for raising this. I have passed it to our documentation team.

[thomaso]

@Gabe, do you mean the help text should get changed? – I'd rather appreciate to get the Synchronize button work temporarily, within a session or document only.
It appears to work (as permanent setting) if I use the menu "Edit > Defaults > Sync" + additional "Edit > Defaults > Save", but selecting 2 submenus is a bit cumbersome.

Or am I using the buttons not correctly to get temporary defaults?

[walt.farrell]

If you Synchronize the defaults they are changed for the current document.

If you then Revert them, they revert to the application defaults that you last Saved.

If you want to change the application defaults, you must do a Save after you do the Synchronize.

[thomaso]

1 hour ago, walt.farrell said:

If you Synchronize the defaults they are changed for the current document.

 And how do you apply these temporary synchronised defaults? – If you can do it as described in the help I'd appreciate a screencast showing it.
 

It may be my lack of English but to me the button "Revert defaults" does actually 'revert TO defaults' for selected objects. Whereas 'revert defaults' would mean to do something to the defaults, in particular revert them, or reset, which is done via the menu "Factory Reset".

However, in this thread the question is not about the permanent (= application) defaults but how the buttons "Synchronise..." + "Revert..." can be used to assign a temporary default to a selected object, – or how to assign the default which, as you say, got "changed for the current document."

[walt.farrell]

34 minutes ago, thomaso said:

And how do you apply these temporary synchronised defaults? – If you can do it as described in the help I'd appreciate a screencast showing it.

Sorry; I don't do screencasts.

But, basically, once you've Synchronized the defaults from a selection, those will be the defaults for the next object(s) you create. So, just create the object you want, and it should have those attributes.

35 minutes ago, thomaso said:

It may be my lack of English but to me the button "Revert defaults" does actually 'revert TO defaults' for selected objects. Whereas 'revert defaults' would mean to do something to the defaults, in particular revert them, or reset, which is done via the menu "Factory Reset".

Revert Defaults sets the defaults for all object attributes back to the defaults you last Saved for the application. This is different from Factory Reset, which sets them all back to the initial defaults when the program was installed.

37 minutes ago, thomaso said:

However, in this thread the question is not about the permanent (= application) defaults but how the buttons "Synchronise..." + "Revert..." can be used to assign a temporary default to a selected object, – or how to assign the default which, as you say, got "changed for the current document."

Synchronize sets the temporary defaults.

Revert undoes all temporary defaults and sets all object default attributes back to the last ones Saved for the application.

[thomaso]

15 hours ago, walt.farrell said:

Synchronize sets the temporary defaults.

Revert undoes all temporary defaults

I miss the step in between. All text of your two posts feels already known to me. (As if you avoid to answer my question but talk around it.)

I still miss the command/button/menu to apply (assign?) a recently synchronized default.

Compare my video above: I want to assign (apply/transfer) the yellow text style – which I just have synchronized in this moment – to the frame on the right. How to   do?

 

[walt.farrell]

1 minute ago, thomaso said:

Compare my video above: I want to assign (apply/transfer) the yellow text style – which I just have synchronized in this moment – to the frame on the right. How to do?

There is no direct way to do that. Defaults are what applies when you create new objects.

If you have an existing object you want to change, then you would have to create a Style from your other object, and then assign the Style to the object you want to change.

[thomaso]

43 minutes ago, walt.farrell said:

once you've Synchronized the defaults from a selection, those will be the defaults for the next object(s) you create. So, just create the object you want, and it should have those attributes.

Does it work for you? – As you can see in my video above, it doesn't work to me. Instead any recent style change, for instance the handwriting style in the upper right frame in the video, gets auto-applied for a newly created frame (in the video below the others).

Again: How do you apply a synchronized style?

[walt.farrell]

Just now, thomaso said:

Again: How do you apply a synchronized style?

Again, you create a new object, and it picks up the default that you synchronized.

[thomaso]

2 hours ago, walt.farrell said:

Again, you create a new object, and it picks up the default that you synchronized.

No, it does not in my experience. In the video above I...

1. ... synchronize the style from the upper left frame.
2. ... do something to the upper right frame.
3. ... create below a new frame. But this new frame does NOT have the synchronized style.
4. ... instead the new frame shows the style of the upper right, which was NOT synchronized.

So, how can I make any use of a synced style?

[Gabe]

For what it's worth, I was expecting it to work as thomaso said in the initial reply. When you "Sync from selection", I was expecting it to overwrite the default, for this document only. This way, one could easily "Apply" that style using the "Revert" button. 

 

19 hours ago, thomaso said:

@Gabe, do you mean the help text should get changed? – I'd rather appreciate to get the Synchronize button work temporarily, within a session or document only.
It appears to work (as permanent setting) if I use the menu "Edit > Defaults > Sync" + additional "Edit > Defaults > Save", but selecting 2 submenus is a bit cumbersome.

Or am I using the buttons not correctly to get temporary defaults?

When there's a mismatch like this between Help and the actual behaviour, our docs team check with the devs and see which one needs changing. 

[thomaso]

22 minutes ago, Gabe said:

I was expecting it to overwrite the default, for this document only. This way, one could easily "Apply" that style using the "Revert" button. 

Yes, thank you! – But regardless of a help text precision in my UX the UI has a malfunction:

12 hours ago, walt.farrell said:

There is no direct way to do that. Defaults are what applies when you create new objects.

In case these defaults should – by concept & code purposely – get applied only to *NEW* objects, then I wonder about the idea (~ sense) of the Sync button at all. Because then it is very easy to just copy/paste or cmd-drag an object to get a NEW object in this style, – without the need of an extra interface like the sync button.

Furthermore then (if defaults shall work for NEW objects only) also the two-step action of Sync + Save (via menu) would not be necessary. Instead the "Sync" button could always Save, too, while the "Revert" button would apply it and the "Factory Reset" menu would Reset + Save (as it indeed does already, in 1 step).

Finally, if synchronized defaults should by design apply to new created objects only: To me it seems a permanent synchronisation works all the time already: when I create an object and define its style, then a new object appears with this recently used look – without having pressed the Sync button at all. (–> see the video, 1:00 min: the text in the 3rd object obviously has the style of the 2nd, although the Sync button was not pressed for the 2nd but the 1st object).

So to me the "Factory Reset" menu command is currently the only one of the 4 available options which really does what it says. The others are either unclear (Sync vs. Save) or not working (apply the synced) or redundant (either Revert button or Factory reset menu).

[garrettm30]

7 hours ago, thomaso said:

To me it seems a permanent synchronisation works all the time already

I'm with Thomaso here: it does seem confusing, and I still don't think I quite understand it. It does seem like the sync button would be superfluous if the (document) defaults are updated all along, but I suppose it could still be useful if you want to select an object made earlier and reset document defaults to the state of that older object.

[thomaso]

> It does seem like the sync button would be superfluous if the (document) defaults are updated all along, but I suppose it could still be useful

Thank you, I already was afraid to be or become insane since Walt seemed not only to understand how it works but also did not see any issue.

If it will work as expected it can be a wonderful Style Picker Tool: just sync + assign.
(which, I guess, was posted as missing quite a few times in the feedback forum)

> if you want to select an object made earlier and reset document defaults to the state of that older object.

Therefore you wouldn't need a Sync button, just Save ("... selected as defaults") is enough. This is currently the strange 2-step workflow I mentioned.

[GeoVictor]

Hi I've the same issue. The sync option is not working. Is there a way to fix it?

Thank you

[walt.farrell]

24 minutes ago, GeoVictor said:

I've the same issue. The sync option is not working.

Can you provide more details on exactly what you're doing? A detailed sequence of steps leading up to it not working? Or a screen recording?

 

[GeoVictor]

Hi @walt.farrell. I uploaded a video. Basically, I created a stroke with Pencil tool, set it as default. When I created another stroke it worked fine. If I change this last stroke  and draw another one AF Design doesn't reproduce my default settings. Am I doing something wrong here?

Thank you

[thomaso]

2 hours ago, GeoVictor said:

I uploaded a video. Basically, I created a stroke with Pencil tool, set it as default. When I created another stroke it worked fine. If I change this last stroke  and draw another one AF Design doesn't reproduce my default settings. Am I doing something wrong here?

As you said before, that's the same unexpected occurrence as shown in the topic's initial video and also described here.

3 hours ago, walt.farrell said:

Can you provide more details on exactly what you're doing? A detailed sequence of steps leading up to it not working? Or a screen recording?

Walt, how about experimenting yourself instead of writing and requesting known content? If ten people would report to experience "the same issue" would you then ask ten times about a detailed workflow and video again? – By the way it appears strange that you request a screencast but refuse to do one yourself:

On 6/2/2020 at 9:21 PM, walt.farrell said:

I don't do screencasts.

 

[walt.farrell]

1 hour ago, thomaso said:

how about experimenting yourself instead of writing and requesting known content?

I don't know what kind of work you do, or have done. But anyone who has done tech support as long as I have probably knows that users often say "the same issue" when it isn't the exact same issue. Also, there are a lot of Synchronize Defaults and Revert Defaults functions that work properly, but are misunderstood by the users who then think they've found a problem.

It is better for all if we have an exact description of the problem, because of the misunderstandings and mistakes that users often make. (Even me, which is why I try to be precise about what I've done whenever I report something. That way, when I'm wrong, it's easy for someone who understands it better to explain it to me.)

[walt.farrell]

1 hour ago, thomaso said:

that's the same unexpected occurrence as shown in the topic's initial video

And, no, it's not the "same" unexpected occurrence as shown in the initial video, as that was with Frame Text, and with Frame Text you have an additional interaction between the defaults for the Frame and the defaults for the text within the frame.

It may be the same root cause, and the same bug, but it is not the same situation/occurrence.

[walt.farrell]

3 hours ago, GeoVictor said:

If I change this last stroke  and draw another one AF Design doesn't reproduce my default settings. Am I doing something wrong here?

I am not sure if that behavior is a bug.

But in discussing the original situation, @Gabe mentioned that he thought that one might need to use the Revert Defaults button to get the new default style applied. I don't know if his understanding was correct, but that also doesn't work (as he mentioned, and as I just confirmed by experimentation).

So this is perhaps a bug, but I'm not sure exactly what the bug is (or, what Serif views the bug to be). This behavior may be partly rooted in the fact that some Affinity tools remember their last state and apply that to new objects. So in your case you: 

1. Created an object, and styled it, and set that style as a default.
2. Drew a second object, which used that default style from 1.
3. You then changed the object from 2.
4. You then drew a 3rd object, which had the style from step 3, not the default style.

So, the question is, if a tool remembers its settings from the last use (step 3), which should be used in step 4? The default style set in step 1, or the remembered tool settings set in step 3?

(Many of us have requested that more tools remember more settings. And here we have a tool which has, apparently, remembered its settings. There is some kind of catch-22 situation  here, where we would like tools to remember settings, and are unhappy when they don't. But then we are also unhappy when they do.)

[thomaso]

16 hours ago, walt.farrell said:

And, no, it's not the "same" unexpected occurrence as shown in the initial video, as that was with Frame Text, and with Frame Text you have an additional interaction between the defaults for the Frame and the defaults for the text within the frame.

It may be the same root cause, and the same bug, but it is not the same situation/occurrence.

That's a weird understanding of "same" here which also implies you never could have a "same" occurrence or situation because even just two trials at least differ in their creation time, even if done with identical object creation in an identical document and hardware.

Obviously here in both videos the sync button is used but doesn't apply to a new created object. So this topic's behavior of a not working sync button is exactly the same: just doing nothing in the user's experience.

Of course, now you may argue that even one "nothing" is different from another "nothing" and two "nothings" are never the same, just as you are no longer the same as you were in the moment before – a true, possibly even sophisticated distinction of "same", however, not useful here.

16 hours ago, walt.farrell said:

So, the question is, if a tool remembers its settings from the last use (step 3), which should be used in step 4? The default style set in step 1, or the remembered tool settings set in step 3?

That's the point – but whom do you ask? You confirm an issue and repeat with your words what was already mentioned:

On 6/3/2020 at 12:36 PM, thomaso said:

Finally, if synchronized defaults should by design apply to new created objects only: To me it seems a permanent synchronisation works all the time already: when I create an object and define its style, then a new object appears with this recently used look – without having pressed the Sync button at all. (–> see the video, 1:00 min: the text in the 3rd object obviously has the style of the 2nd, although the Sync button was not pressed for the 2nd but the 1st object).

This app internal conflict appears to be coded either in purpose or without caring whether or how the user would be able to handle or solve it.

Since you insist to point out to be "not sure" if this "is a bug" or whether it should be called a "catch-22 situation" – please note, and possibly respect: Not the term bothers the user but the  behavior of the app, causing the same UX even in entirely different situations.

[walt.farrell]

12 minutes ago, thomaso said:

but whom do you ask? You confirm an issue and repeat with your words what was already mentioned

Gabe, whom I tagged for a clarification about what Serif thinks the bug is.

[GeoVictor]

21 hours ago, thomaso said:

As you said before, that's the same unexpected occurrence as shown in the topic's initial video and also described here.

Walt, how about experimenting yourself instead of writing and requesting known content? If ten people would report to experience "the same issue" would you then ask ten times about a detailed workflow and video again? – By the way it appears strange that you request a screencast but refuse to do one yourself:

 

Ok @thomaso. Thank you. It seem the same unexpected problem.