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What is this blue line in the layers panel?


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I opened a PDF into Affinity Designer and saw something I didn't recognize or understand its purpose. There is a thin blue line between 2 layers. I can't select it, right click on it or any other number of alternate keyboard modifier key clicks. I also can't see any difference that it might be making to the document. It's not like everything above it is locked or invisible or indicating a clipping layer. It also seems to be attached to the layer above it as it moves when I drag layers around.

 

Please can someone educate as to what it's for. Hopefully it's some awesome hidden feature I know nothing about, and not just a glitch from the PDF.

 

post-14828-0-39665200-1487150332_thumb.jpg

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  • Staff

You can change the colour of a layer and this will affect the colour used by the tool when objects are selected on this layer. Simply right-click the layer and choose 'Properties' and you can see that the layer colour can be changed. If you select an object on that layer, you should find that your tool colour changes accordingly.

 

This makes it easier to spot which layer you're working on, or to set a very obvious layer colour that's different to the content you're designing.

 

Hope that helps,

Matt

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Ah-hah!

 

That is a nice feature. I often struggle with the bounding box handle colour – it's too similar to sky so changing the colour is very useful.

 

Putting that colour indication under the layer isn't obvious or intuitive because it doesn't look like an attribute of the layer above it, but rather the way the top layer interacts with the layer below.

 

A thin line at the end of the layer would've made more sense and be more obvious.

 

Like this screenshot:

post-14828-0-98577000-1487157471_thumb.jpg

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This is pretty cool, I never noticed I could do this. A suggestion though, can the colours be randomized for each new layer created? That way we don't have to change each layer, which is time consuming, and makes this feature more obvious. I also think Stephen's idea of how to display the layer colour is much nicer.

Thanks!

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A suggestion though, can the colours be randomized for each new layer created? 

 

I think that would drive me crazy. I like consistency and uniformity. If my layers were suddenly pink and green and yellow I'd end up manually changing them back to a single preferred colour.

 

Can I suggest, to speed up changing the colour, could we rather have a few colors as swatches as a quick-select. The custom colour mixer can still be in the Properties, but for a really quick 'n simple colour change, this would be nice.

 

post-14828-0-05630100-1487175069_thumb.jpg

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  • 3 years later...

I'm also for the line being on the right vertical side of the layers
I still can't understand how the blue lines below each layer in the layers panel works.

If the line appears only when I'm working on a current layer, why do I have blue lines on every layer in my document? Does someone know?

image.png.8ace164fb14fe6fee545789241ce2ae9.png

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Oh I figured out the meaning behind the horizontal line beneath layers. Here it is for those who also want to know.


The blue line beneath each layer indicates the color of the "selection lines" that appear around the object when selected with the Move Tool.
Here is an example where I changed the color of the layer to dark red using: Right-click a layerProperties Click on the current color to change it.

image.png.117c629b8ddf5a749b1b23a0d8a705f2.png

Only layers will have such a line beneath them.

Thank you @MattP for the explanation, it just took me some time to figure it out. :)

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I like the way it currently works, as putting it at the side would be too much and a little hard to flag when you use colour to identify items and groups - the way it currently works makes it obvious to differentiate layers and groups which is great for us thicko's

Screen Grab 2020-11-24 at 13.00.51.png

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16 minutes ago, Dazmondo77 said:

I like the way it currently works, as putting it at the side would be too much and a little hard to flag when you use colour to identify items and groups - the way it currently works makes it obvious to differentiate layers and groups which is great for us thicko's

I do agree with that now. My previous opinion was because I wasn't fully aware of the functionality.

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