Designer gradient controls—I don't know how it happened

[Washishu]

As I’m not working for a living these days I don’t have the need to use Designer very often so my learning curve is a little flat. Recently I was working with gradient fills and accidentally the four-way gradient controls device appeared. I have no idea how I did this and the only purpose I could detect was that it appeared to control the angle of the gradient although it seemed a rather clumsy and imprecise way of doing this.

Since then I’ve searched the forum and found a thread which explains that this device appears when an object is sheared. Well, these four-way controls appeared more than once on different rectangles. I was working with straight-forward rectangles with no transformations so I don’t know how this happened—and once it had happened I couldn’t find a way to get rid of them other than deleting the gradient and starting again.

I was using the Transform palette to enter specific dimensions for the rectangle, and also using the tab key to jump from one box to the next, so it’s a remote possibility that, once, I might have applied a shear angle unintentionally although I have no memory of this happening. Would it be that if I had unintentionally applied a shear angle and immediately undone it, that the four-way device would remain?

It’s not a big deal as I just ignored them, but they were a bit of an unwanted intrusion. Also, as my learning curve is a little flat, I’d like to understand what might have happened.

[GarryP]

You should be able to change the gradient back to a ‘normal’ gradient by double-clicking one of the ‘nodes’ (called a “correction end stop”) which has two dotted lines coming from it – see attached video.

 

[thomaso]

1 hour ago, Washishu said:

Also, as my learning curve is a little flat, I’d like to understand what might have happened.

If you edit a style property of an object Affinity often uses the recent style setting also for newly created objects … to make it easier to create several objects in the recently created style. So it can happen that a gradient of a sheared object gets assigned to one that has not been modified this way. Then you can drag a handle at the dashed line end and it will disappear once you release the mouse button. Alternatively you can drag it onto its according handle at the solid line to get rid of it. Or, as @GarryP mentioned, just double-click it.

If you want to reset such a recently used style you can click the "Revert Defaults" button in the Toolbar. Whereas its "Synchronize (…)" button version can be used to copy style properties from a different existing object to this "Defaults"-memory and create new objects with that former style.

[HCl]

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[thomaso]

5 minutes ago, Return said:

It should have an opt in/opt out option in the settings where one can set it to apply current attributes to new objects.

A simple on/off switch wouldn't solve the problem: Sometimes you don't want all properties of a style being re-used for new objects, for instance a dashed stroke but not the object fill, or a font face but not its size or colour, etc. …

To satisfy all needs it may require an additional, complex dialog/options window to select these style propertie(s) you want to be re-used for a new object and un-tick those that should be created with the current app Defaults instead. – In that case it often might be easier just to click the "Revert" button instead and to start with styling the newly created object from that point, or to use "Synchronize" if the wanted style exists in another object already.

However, additionally Affinity has the copy/paste style option for alternative or additional use. Plus the two styles panels to store certain styles.

[HCl]

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[Washishu]

Ahaa. I'd forgotten that I posted this. Thanks for the responses. And thanks GarryP—I now know how to get rid of it should it happen again.

Re the using previous qualities for new objects, had I sheared some object I might have realised what was going on. My point was that although I can't 100% state that I didn't accidentally shear an object as described above (although I do think that unlikely). It's true that in some cases I would have duplicated then edited an object or two, so if this was an inadvertently sheared object this would account for it. It did seem to be very persistent though, even, I feel sure (although it is a long time back now), after creating other elements without gradient fills.