how to set a default stroke style in Publisher>Designer?

[AristideTorchia]

Hi. I cannot for the life of my find a way to set a default style for Pen made vector strokes. This means that I have to copy and paste the last stroke style on every single new object I create with the Pen.

Surely there must exist a way to indicate to the app that I wish for it to become the new default.

Could someone please point me to it?

[Old Bruce]

13 minutes ago, AristideTorchia said:

Surely there must exist a way to indicate to the app that I wish for it to become the new default.

Make a stroke the way you want it. With the Pen tool selected and the Stroke selected in the Layers panel go to Edit > Defaults > Synchronize from selection and then immediately go to Edit > Defaults > Save. Note that if you want to have a fill used then before you use the Edit menu check the Use Fill in the Context toolbar.

A further nnote is that this is per Application.

[AristideTorchia]

Uff...

Many thanks Bruce - that worked. 

 

That said, it really seems to me a HUGELY convoluted way to go about something as basic and frequently needed.

If Affinity is seeing this... how about a button on the Pen's toolbar, or in Styles panel, or the Stroke panel?

Basically all of the common sense places you'd expect to find this function.

 

Thanks again Bruce

[R C-R]

4 hours ago, AristideTorchia said:

If Affinity is seeing this... how about a button on the Pen's toolbar, or in Styles panel, or the Stroke panel?

If you want the developers to see this, you should post in the Feedback & Suggestions forum (here only the support staff like the mods are likely to see it), but keep in mind that there are separate object defaults for each of several different object types, Pen Tool objects being only one of them, & that there are separate options for syncing to the current defaults while retaining the ability to revert them to the saved ones (so non-destructive but quite useful in some workflows), & the destructive options of resetting them to the factory defaults & setting global defaults.

So the TL;DR version is this is a complex function with many different possibilities, so a single button would only be able to access a tiny fraction of them.

[AristideTorchia]

Sure, I'll drop feedback when I have a moment. 

I'm new to Affinity so it's entirely possible that I'm missing something, but it appears to me somewhat straightforward:

to set a new default for pen object, one presses the appropriate button on the Pen toolbar. For default text, one does so in the text toolbar et cetera.

It wouldn't hurt to add such button to the styles tab neither, where few buttons can differentiate between what is being saved. 

It's just about lessening how much one has to go through the app menu bar, at least on the mac. 

[R C-R]

19 minutes ago, AristideTorchia said:

It's just about lessening how much one has to go through the app menu bar, at least on the mac. 

If you want, you can assign keyboard shortcuts to anything on the Edit menu, including any or all of the Default options.

[AristideTorchia]

17 minutes ago, R C-R said:

if you want, you can assign keyboard shortcuts to anything on the Edit menu, including any or all of the Default options.

Oh definitely, I'm already exploiting this massively using the old faithful logitech g13 gameboard, having it filled absolutely to the brim with shortcuts for mostly everything - some 40 odd keys filtered through permutations and combinations of four modifiers  

[R C-R]

6 minutes ago, AristideTorchia said:

Oh definitely, I'm already exploiting this massively using the old faithful logitech g13 gameboard, having it filled absolutely to the brim with shortcuts for mostly everything - some 40 odd keys filtered through permutations and combinations of four modifiers  

You can do that directly in the Settings menu & it will work with any keyboard.

[AristideTorchia]

Yep.

[Meliora spero]

7 hours ago, AristideTorchia said:

That said, it really seems to me a HUGELY convoluted way to go about something as basic and frequently needed.

If Affinity is seeing this... how about a button on the Pen's toolbar, or in Styles panel, or the Stroke panel?

Basically all of the common sense places you'd expect to find this function.

Let us meditate a bit on whether "I cannot for the life of me" would be interpreted as good feedback in a user test conducted by a usability expert. 🤔

You're absolutely right, and this is what Serif gets from letting engineers with a 90s mindset handle usability work. It's an outdated, terrible feature that ages like a pile of fish left in the sun on a compost heap.

The name of the function - synchronize defaults from selection - proves it more than anything else. Who chooses such phrasing for customers? And especially for customers who, in Serif's case, have always been predominantly beginners? Serif migrated concepts from their old Plus range of programs from before Affinity, and this is one of them. I can trace it back to X3 from 2009, and it might be even older. There are other archaeological remnants in Affinity from the Plus range, such as Styles, which are merely set-and-forget presets, not real styles that can be updated centrally to automatically update objects linked to the style, like typographies.

It's like writing "Synchronize the main reactor's components with the button's depressed state" instead of just STOP on an emergency button in a nuclear reactor.

My best advice to Canva (which has now acquired Serif) is not to gloss over these engineer-conceived shortcomings from a distant era, but to fundamentally rethink central solutions so that both the architecture and the customers benefit, ensuring optimal maintainability and usability.

Otherwise, the next step is enshittification, which remains an inevitable threat regardless of whether this particular issue is resolved.

[R C-R]

38 minutes ago, Deperditus Cliens said:

The name of the function - synchronize defaults from selection - proves it more than anything else.

What is unclear about that? It does exactly what it says it does; namely, to set the default parameters to those of the currently selected object. How much clearer could it be?

40 minutes ago, Deperditus Cliens said:

And especially for customers who, in Serif's case, have always been predominantly beginners? 

Who says their customers are mostly beginners? Just consider how many former longtime Adobe users there are who have mentioned that they have switched to Affinity.

[AristideTorchia]

Not to drag this on, but I don't want to be misinterpreted here.

I'm by no means a beginner, but my experience is mostly in film postproduction and photoshop - I'm new to Affinity and new to the vector realm.

I genuinely enjoy working with the V2 Suite – despite minor glitches – and I don't consider its UX to be poorly designed. You want bad, go visit Capture One for a day.

 

The gist is this: there's nothing wrong with 'synchronise from selection' et cetera - professional level software is full of those (see Davinci Resolve, for instance). But going by various UX elements already present on-screen, one can be forgiven for trying to find a button for such function where it is to be expected – in the stroke panel.

That's all - it'd be good to flesh out such features going forward. Other than that, onwards and upwards Affinity – you're doing great all things considered.

[R C-R]

40 minutes ago, AristideTorchia said:

one can be forgiven for trying to find a button for such function where it is to be expected – in the stroke panel.

Except that a default sets more than the default stroke attribute of a vector object....

[AristideTorchia]

46 minutes ago, R C-R said:

Except that a default sets more than the default stroke attribute of a vector object....

Certainly. I don't think anything stands in the way of it being split into several sub-functions, available somewhere on-screen in places appropriate to the actions, perhaps the toolbar itself. It just seems like too critical an action to be buried in an 'edit' submenu as a sequence of two consecutive commands - that's the only point I'm making. Be nice to have it somewhere on the surface as a QoL feature.

[R C-R]

6 hours ago, AristideTorchia said:

I don't think anything stands in the way of it being split into several sub-functions...

So you mean for instance a separate default for vector fill color, for two two vector stroke parameters, for the text defaults, etc? And what about syncing vs. factory resets vs. saving? Should those also somehow be broken down into sub-functions?

If something like this is what you mean, I think that would be more of a hassle & confusing to manage than what we have now.

[thomaso]

On 12/14/2024 at 4:34 PM, AristideTorchia said:

it really seems to me a HUGELY convoluted way to go about something as basic and frequently needed.

If Affinity is seeing this... how about a button on the Pen's toolbar, or in Styles panel, or the Stroke panel?

If a change to the stroke default is frequently needed, possibly you don't need or want to set it as general app default (for every document) but as a temporary default within the current document?

If yes, then pressing the button "Synchronize" in the Toolbar may be sufficient to get a setting used for future objects. (without menu Edit > Defaults > Save)

• Synchronise defaults from selection—the default settings are updated to those of the currently selected object.
• Revert defaults—synchronized defaults are reverted to saved defaults. If an object is currently selected, its attributes revert to the default settings.

[AristideTorchia]

On 12/15/2024 at 11:09 PM, R C-R said:

If something like this is what you mean, I think that would be more of a hassle & confusing to manage than what we have now.

You may be right on that, fair points. 

 

 

[AristideTorchia]

On 12/16/2024 at 2:26 AM, thomaso said:

If yes, then pressing the button "Synchronize" in the Toolbar may be sufficient to get a setting used for future objects.

This is extremely useful and probably exactly what I was after in the first place. Many thanks for pointing me to it!