Designer: Fix "Pages" selection in Print dialog

[Osric]

When I go to print in Designer 2.50 (2415) on the Mac and choose to print "Artboards",  I get a list of "Pages" and have to scroll through it to check off the the art boards I want to print. They are arranged in what looks like an arbitrary order. And large, multi-artboard files are a chore to select/deselect multiple "pages" since the preview list often doesn't show a thumbnail.

Since Designer doesn't have a Pages view, what's going on here? 

Please at least change the "Page X of Y" in the preview pane to the name of the artboard.

 

[GarryP]

2.5.x is the current beta version.

Does this problem only occur with the beta or does it also occur with the commercial release 2.4.x?

(Problems with the beta, that don’t also affect the commercial release, should be posted in the relevant beta section of the forums.)

[walt.farrell]

Can you include the complete screen in your screenshot, please? I think that may help us understand this.

 

[Osric]

It happens in both the beta and release versions.

[Osric]

2 minutes ago, walt.farrell said:

Can you include the complete screen in your screenshot, please? I think that may help us understand this.

 

Here's the complete screenshot: 

[walt.farrell]

41 minutes ago, Osric said:

They are arranged in what looks like an arbitrary order.

Thanks for the better screenshot.

For this part of your question, you should find that they are in order, from the bottom of the Layers panel to the top of the Layers panel.

Items lower in the Layers panel are presumed to have been created before items higher in the Layers panel. The analogy for this is a canvas and someone painting strokes that cross each other. When you examine a cross-section through the overlapping strokes, those that were painted earlier are closer to the canvas, and beneath those that were painted layer.

The arrangement in the workspace, which may make sense to you in some way, is not relevant for many operations in the application, including Printing and Exporting. It's the order in the Layers panel that matters.

[Osric]

5 minutes ago, walt.farrell said:

Thanks for the better screenshot.

For this part of your question, you should find that they are in order, from the bottom of the Layers panel to the top of the Layers panel.

Items lower in the Layers panel are presumed to have been created before items higher in the Layers panel. The analogy for this is a canvas and someone painting strokes that cross each other. When you examine a cross-section through the overlapping strokes, those that were painted earlier are closer to the canvas, and beneath those that were painted layer.

The arrangement in the workspace, which may make sense to you in some way, is not relevant for many operations in the application, including Printing and Exporting. It's the order in the Layers panel that matters.

Right, I'm used to the upside-down artboard order, but that doesn't help here. 

The Print dialog should have a normal Page Range input field where you can specify which "pages" to print so you don't have to scroll through a thumbnail list to check off pages you don't want to print.

In Publisher's Print dialog you get the normal Page Range field, and there's an empty space in Designer's Print dialog where it would be.

It's just inconsistent and I can't imagine I'm the only user who finds this befuddling from time to time.

 

[Osric]

Also, there's another thread about the blank thumbnails showing in Publisher's Print dialog:

Apparently hitting the Tab key in the Page Range field refreshes the thumbnails. Alas, there is no Page Range field in Designer so this workaround isn't available.

[walt.farrell]

4 minutes ago, Osric said:

The Print dialog should have a normal Page Range input field where you can specify which "pages" to print so you don't have to scroll through a thumbnail list to check off pages you don't want to print.

Designer doesn't have Pages, normally. It has Artboards, which do not have numeric "names" to determine an order, as pages would have. The order is that specified in the Layers panel.

Publisher has Pages, and pages have numeric "names" that determine a natural order. (And Designer will have Pages if you open a document created by Publisher, with pages, in Designer.)