Appearance panel issues

[Paul Mc]

This post comes from my frustration about having to rework a significant part of a project because of problems with the Appearance panel. I have posted about this previously but thought a new thread would be better.

The Appearance panel, in my recent experience, is an incomplete design and implementation. I'm guessing that it was introduced to satisfy some requirement but it wasn't completely thought through from both a UI/UX and a functional perspective.

In the normal use, we can create a curve and then over in the Appearance panel we can add an extra stroke. Fine. Note that without the curve selected the Appearance panel reverts to the regular Stroke panel properties.

We can then duplicate that curve. Selecting either curve shows the stack of strokes as expected.

Selecting both curves (with identical attributes/properties) will only show the "base" stroke/fill properties and the new stroke properties are not visible. There might be a good reason in the code for this but from a UI point of view this is very unintuitive and unexpected. Because the new stroke properties are not visible, any changes to the properties of any additional strokes or fills can only be made if a single curve is selected.  In my case there are hundreds of strokes that need to be changed so this isn't a reasonable possibility.

The problem which started all this was to draw a leaf and then scale it to fit into another illustration. For context, there are many leaves and each leaf has many veins. The veins are drawn using two strokes in Appearance, one thin light green and and outer one (underneath) that is dark green. Scaling it produced this result whereas I wanted the veins to scale proportionally with the leaf. In this case the upper stroke completely covers the lower one.

I also have some issues with the Paste Style operation. It seems to work some of the time. As an alternative to the above method I was expecting to be able to select a single curve, set its attributes, copy it, select the other objects and then Paste Style to have all the strokes in the Appearance panel be copied to them. This nearly works but I'm seeing different stroke widths appearing on the strokes above the base stroke. The base stroke in my testing appears to remain set at the copied source value. Any strokes above it seem to get set to random values. Again, because you cannot select multiple curves, and access the additional strokes, fixing this is not possible without editing individual curves.

  

So then, as an experiment, I thought I'd copy my leaf object with a group of curves and paste it as a New From Clipboard document in case that would reset something and allow me to continue. The stroke widths changed. Subsequent scaling/resizing of the object only scales the stroke width of the base stroke - as expected. I'm guessing that this is a completely unrelated issue so won't discuss this further as it is a distraction from my getting my problem resolved.

In my particular instance all of this would have been avoided if the Scale With Object checkbox had been checked in the new stroke before I used it to draw the veins of the leaves. It was set in the parent group and the base stroke but not the top stroke that I added. I've been unable to figure out a way to select all my curves and then apply that setting to them all without it causing problems.  All I want to do is scale the leaf down to a smaller size without the strokes looking fat and out of scale. I can't see any reason why this isn't checked by default. The situations where you would not want this checked seem (to me at least) very niche. Alternatively, Preferences could have a default setting for this if my expectations are wrong or biased.

Back to the UI and user expectations, checking Scale with object in the stroke should really be setting it in all the Appearance strokes too (IMHO). If I had two strokes in Appearance with one checked and the other not checked then what is the point of having it checked in the Stroke panel? In addition to this inheritance seems to be a bit hit and miss. If I collect the curves together in a group or layer and then check Scale with object shouldn't that be applied to all objects within the group?

I'm sure I'm missing things and there may be a way to do what I want but after several hours of research and experimentation I could not discover how that could be done.

 

[DWright]

Did @Dan C cover all of your questions in the forum post below regarding this.

 

 

[Paul Mc]

Hi @DWright I think he did although it is difficult to know for sure. For what I want to do I understand that with the current version of Designer there is no procedure I can follow. In my explorations I think I've uncovered several bugs as well which Dan appeared to acknowledge and said he'd passed to the devs. The timescale on my current project (deadline today) means I can't wait for the fixes/enhancements so hopefully these will be of benefit in the future. I've found another way to achieve my result using SVG exports and InkScape. Dan's response was very prompt and encouraging. Knowing that this type of edit wasn't possible was useful information so I knew I had to use another method. I hope my post also provided some insight into my mental model of workflow expectations and might provide some input into future design decisions such that they are more complete and robust. I realise that might sound a little selfish but I'm also a developer and know first-hand that I'm an "expert" in how my own code works, however I've learned over the years that this also presents an obstacle in trying to understand it from a user perspective. I'm happy to make myself available for any discussion or testing of these kinds of things.

[rvsf]

is there anything new in affinity 2?

 I would like to be able to scale all the strokes, also the ones I have pasted inside shapes, without having to go one by one.