Character settings memory

[bpedit]

I suspect this is probably more generic to Designer but this is where it's bugging me the most. 

 

Suppose you have a line of text with particular character attributes such as size and baseline set. Now you select a particular subset of characters and change those attributes with the intent of the changes only applying to the selecion. Designer now retains those changes when you enter new text and you have to re-enter your "default" parameters again. 

 

Am I missing something? It would seem the behavior should be that when particular text is selected and changes should only apply to that text then revert to the former settings when the text is de-selected. 

[Dave Harris]

This is by design. The idea is that having used a particular font etc, you'll want to keep on using it. All the object attributes work this way, not just text. However, if you want to revert to the original document defaults, there is a button in the top toolbar that does this.

 

Incidentally, you can make the current defaults the defaults for new documents, by using Edit > Defaults > Save. You can use this if you want the default text to be other than 12pt Arial, for example. In 1.5, Designer will have text styles (currently in the Mac beta), which should make formatting text easier too.

[bpedit]

Onerous design, I guess Illustrator trumps in this regard. Your point is well taken, I do want to keep using the particular set of attributes, but not for every character. I do science education apps and often use subscripts, superscripts and Greek symbols. Or sometimes I want to slant, bold or kern a word. What a pain resetting to my current set of attributes each time. 

 

Is there any use in moving this to a feature request or is this a static paradigm?

[Dave Harris]

I've moved it to Feature Requests.

[bpedit]

Thanks!

[MikeW]

Just for the record, I never wish for a new object to use that last used settings. I always desire for new objects of any sort to use the defaults. So I would be in favor for a check box in preferences (like XDP has) to change this behavior.

[bpedit]

To be clear, as I envision this "feature", it would only apply to selected text. That is, text within a text object which is currently highlighted with the Text Tool. It would not apply if the text were selected with, say, the Move Tool.