Colour Picker not working on Swatches panel

[GarryP]

Windows 10 - Publisher 1.7.0.139

I've tried three documents - two from previous versions of APu, one new document - and the colour picker - on the Swatches panel - isn't picking up colours from the document canvas; it always comes back with 0,0,0. It picks colours from the UI and other Windows apps, just not within the document canvas itself. Doesn't matter is anything is selected or not. Although, I have noticed that the colour picker on the Colour Chooser palette does work, and the picked colour is transferred to the Swatches colour picker. Edit: Actually, that's stopped working now too.
Another thing I noticed is that the CMYK of the RGB 0,0,0 that is picked shows in the Colour Chooser as 72, 68, 67, 88. I don't know if this is meaningful.

[Chris B]

Hey Garry,

This seems to have broken. I can't recall if it happened in a previous build (I'll have to check). I'll pass your feedback to the developers—thank you  

[GarryP]

You're welcome.

I can't remember using it on previous builds myself but I remember reading a post where someone was asking for the colour picker to have a keyboard shortcut so they've probably been using it.

[GarryP]

I've noticed that this still isn't working on build 145 - the colour shown on the 'magnifier' is RGB 0,0,0 and black is picked (with the same CMYK values as mentioned earlier).
I realise that there will be a lot of other work going on but I wouldn't want this to fall through the cracks as it's one of those silly "If this simple thing doesn't work then how can I trust anything else it does"-type of issues.

[Chris B]

I'll update the affected version on the bug report. Thanks Garry. 

[GarryP]

You're welcome again.

My worry is that this sort of easy-to-forget thing is something that a mean-spirited reviewer would jump on wearing hob-nail boots.
Many reviewers won't have the experience/time/patience to look at, for example, the versatility of the grid system, or how nicely paragraph decorations work, or how well font alternates are handled, or maybe even 5% of what the software can do. But they might look at something simple like the colour picker during their few days - maybe just hours - of experimentation.
It wouldn't matter to them if the rest of the application was working flawlessly, they'd just see it as a way to put the software down, which would be a real shame (at best).

Anyway, as long as it's been noted as an outstanding issue then that's fine and dandy. Cheers.

[GarryP]

Tested with build 157 and the colour is now always 255,255,255 when picked from the canvas. Works fine picking from everything else but as soon as you drag the tool over something on the canvas it goes white.

[GarryP]

Update

The document on which the colour picker started to choose white was from an old build so I'll forget about that.

I tried creating a new test document and the tool has gone back to always picking 'black' from the canvas but it's okay everywhere else.
See attached GIF where you can see:
* From the start, picking a colour from the UI picks the colour and applies it to the selected layer as expected;
* Picking a colour from the page itself picks up 'something' but doesn't apply it to the selected layer;
* Applying the 'something' shows it to be black (visually at least);
* Editing the 'something' shows it to be RGB 0,0,0 but also CMYK 72, 68, 67, 88 (which seems odd in itself);
* Picking a colour from an image on the canvas does the same as picking colour from the page but also sets the Opacity to 0%;
* Picking a colour from a gradient fill also does the same as picking colour from the image.

P.S. Picking a colour from the Pages thumbnails works fine as far as I can tell.

[GarryP]

Addendum: Changing from Intel to NVIDIA graphics doesn't alleviate the problem. No idea if it might - no idea how the tool actually works - but thought I'd try anyway, just in case.

[GarryP]

Update: I'm now on build 162.

I managed to get the colour picker working once but I've no idea how I did it.
I was looking at the issue below and it just started working, until I tried a new document and it stopped working again so the problem still exists (for me at least).

Anyway, a new but possibly related issue...

Workflow - Designer and Publisher:
* Create new document;
* Insert image;
* With the image selected, choose any colour from any palette;
* Image is recoloured as per the chosen colour.

All well and good there, but...

Workflow - Publisher only:
* Create new document;
* Insert image;
* With the image selected, drag the colour picker over the image and release;
* Press the colour picker to select the picked colour;
* Image now goes completely white;
* Click on a palette colour and the image is recoloured as world normally be expected;
* Click on the colour picker again and the image is recoloured with - I think - black;
* Use the Slash symbol to remove the recolouring of the image;
* Press the colour picker again to select the picked colour;
* Image now goes completely white again.

I've no idea if this is related to my previous issue but it seems pretty closely-linked from a user-perspective.