Style panel: Select Unused Styles rather than Delete Unused Styles

[LEB]

Hi,

Unused styles may be (i) unwanted or (ii) not yet used.

In Affinity Publisher v2, it would be preferable to have a command that allows to select styles in the panel list that are not used rather than deleting them directly. Direct deletion does not allow to know exactly what we are deleting.

Please +1 if you like the idea 😉.

Thank you,

Loïc

Edited February 13, 2023 by LEB
Clarified meaning

[loukash]

+1

[MikeTO]

I don't think selecting would work because selecting = apply style to text. But there are other UI approaches Serif could take. So +1

[loukash]

6 hours ago, MikeTO said:

selecting = apply style to text.

Only if you have actually selected a text object.
Whereas this is about "selecting" – or "marking" by some means – the unused text styles in the panel list.

[MikeTO]

7 hours ago, loukash said:

Only if you have actually selected a text object.
Whereas this is about "selecting" – or "marking" by some means – the unused text styles in the panel list.

My point was that selecting a style in the Text Styles panel does something already and can't be used to identify unused styles. That could be done via another mechanism, perhaps one similar to how iOS will put a list into an edit mode for making changes.

[LEB]

Thanks @MikeTO for the comment.

I also noticed that you cannot "select" two styles in the panel list for the reason you point.

Marking would indeed be interesting.

I also thought it could be done continuously without any user action, so you see immediately which styles are not being used, if that is realistic in terms of performance.

 

[MikeTO]

6 hours ago, LEB said:

I also thought it could be done continuously without any user action, so you see immediately which styles are not being used, if that is realistic in terms of performance.

It would be straightforward if it weren't for the Show Samples option - unused styles could be shown with less contrast just like automatically-named layers are shown with less contrast than user-named layers. Show Samples makes that impossible. Another option would be to change the background colour for unused styles but Affinity uses alternating row colours for scrolling lists so that's out. An icon could be added but most people don't need this information all the time so it would add to UI clutter. We don't need to solve this here but this feature request would likely require a manage/edit style feature. That wouldn't be a bad thing because there are other style management features that could be added if there was a manage/edit mode. You could rename styles inline by clicking twice. You could change the style hierarchy by dragging and dropping. You could select multiple styles and merge them. You could select multiple styles and edit their attributes at the same time. Etc.

[walt.farrell]

1 hour ago, MikeTO said:

Show Samples makes that impossible.

It could be a function available only when Show Samples is not active.

[MikeW]

2 hours ago, MikeTO said:

... We don't need to solve this here but this feature request would likely require a manage/edit style feature. That wouldn't be a bad thing because there are other style management features that could be added if there was a manage/edit mode. ...

QXP uses a separate dialog (under the Edit menu) for managing various styles, here regarding text styles. Here displaying a p.style and a c.style that are currently not in use.