Dash/arrow styles

[rwessel]

I was pleased to see that a path can be dashed in a recent release of AD – it's an omission that has been holding me back from using the software on a regular basis. But the implementation is so weak, it's almost unusable. I find most of AD has some really well thought-out workflows, but in this case workflow has been overlooked.

 

For people who use dashes, a degree of uniformity is important. A dash is defined for a specific purpose, and needs to be distinct from dashes made for other purposes, e.g. the dash for a grid-line might look completely different to a dash for a hidden feature. You will be often in the position of wanting to store and recall a dash style independent of all other path characteristics, e.g. line weight, colour, fill pattern etc. AD doesn't seen to have any way to capture a dash style other than to create a 'Style' that captures all other attributes. So attempting to capture a dash from one shape and apply it to another will also change the line weight, colours, fill etc.

 

Can we have a way to store, name, and apply just the dash style? And likewise for arrowheads when that feature is implemented. The features are otherwise not very useful.

[A_B_C]

Hi rwessel,

 

have you seen Matt’s (pretty exciting) reply to your question in that famous “Arrowheads” thread?

 

https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/topic/3378-arrowheads-please/?p=60221

 

Perhaps this will address at least parts of your last request … as far as I understood, you will be able to create a styles category just for line attributes then …  :)

 

Cheers, Alex

[rwessel]

have you seen Matt’s (pretty exciting) reply to your question in that famous “Arrowheads” thread?

 

Yes, I think that's exactly what I'm looking for. To quote the reply:

 

Styles in the future will feature a mask  so that they can record just specific attributes, rather than the whole graphical style of the objects, so that will fix this issue :)

I'd add a suggestion that the mask should apply to the whole style category rather than individual styles. I'd envisage creating categories specifically to capture "Arrowheads" and "Linestyles" (dashes), and it will make the styles easier to capture if I know (for example) that I can capture just the arrowhead by capturing a style in the "Arrowheads" category. That would make for a great workflow.