picture frame tool and styles

[thetasig]

I have a large document with some 250 pictures inside Picture Frames. I have decided to change the look of all by adding a color Stroke, and a rounded corner set at 2%.

Is there any way to make these hundreds of changes in "bulk" - with one command instead of doing each manually? That would save me many hours of work.

[thomaso]

Unfortunately there is no assign-to-all 1-click-way. You will need to select the related frames on each page, page by page, and style those objects again and again.

The only little help I can think of is using either a saved object style (Styles Panel) or saving the desired frame style temporarily as Default + using the "Revert Defaults" button to assign the style to selected frames. – For both options try first if all properties get applied as wanted, means none gets ignored (e.g. fill color) or modified (e.g. stroke width).

In case objects are children of a Master Page you would need to alter them there and only once.

[thetasig]

Hi thomaso  -

I tried to create a style of one example frame that was set up as I wanted. But the style affected only the Stroke width and color, but did not use a 2% corner as the model had. I'd love to know more about how to do what you suggested.

I did find a way to make it much faster though. I entered the Photo Persona and created and saved a macro to change the Stroke size and add a 2% rounded corner to a picture frame. Oddly, you cannot change the Stroke Color during the macro recording - but that is not a problem.

Then I went back to the Publisher Persona and the process is to go to cursor mode (V) then click a picture frame to alter and double-click the macro. Repeat - going to cursor mode (V), click another Picture frame, double-click the macro. The Stroke Color is "remembered" after you make one change on one frame as Publisher automatically uses the same color for each frame you select. I had the whole lot done in about 10 minutes.

[GarryP]

thethasig: Adding a link to another user’s profile page doesn’t really have any purpose in these forums. If you really want to notify them that you have replied – which is not usually necessary – you can type an “at” symbol and then type their name – with no space between the “at” and the name – until you can select it from the pop-up list.

[thomaso]

It appears the options for multi-applying frame properties are even more limited than I suspected before. Indeed strange, a saved Object Style does not save the corner setting whereas a Corner Preset does not save fill and stroke colour and width. As if the app UI tries to make it difficult in purpose.

So, "by design" I not only need to apply two separate presets: Corners and Style…

…but also the UI for applying the corner preset just disappears with more than 1 object selected.

[R C-R]

3 hours ago, thomaso said:

Indeed strange, a saved Object Style does not save the corner setting whereas a Corner Preset does not save fill and stroke colour and width.

While it may not be what is wanted here, I don't think it is all that strange. That is because the different object types do not all support the same corner types. For example cogs, triangles, trapezoids, diamonds, & several others do not offer any corner type options like rectangles, rounded rectangles, & rectangular picture frame objects do. There are none for elliptical picture frame objects either, so really, there are relatively few shape object types that support corner presets.

So at least to me, it makes sense that corner presets & object styles do not save the same object properties.

What is a little strange to me is that if several objects of the same type that do offer corner types are selected, you can't select a corner preset to apply to all of them in one action.

[thomaso]

5 hours ago, R C-R said:

different object types do not all support the same corner types.

I had the "Defaults" in mind which are able to consider various properties if they get applied to different objct types (e.g. text vs. no text). The saved object Styles could work in a similar way, ignoring saved corner property if applied to objects which can't get corners set. As you say, the odditiy is caused by the lack of a feature to apply corners as property of stroke together with stroke color and stroke width, in particular to more than 1 object at a time.