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When deleting style/colour in use, should offer to replace it with another one


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  • 9 months later...
On 1/27/2019 at 9:49 AM, Wosven said:

It would be helpfull when we delete a style or a global colour to be able to replace it with another if it's used in the document.

First, I'll assume you mean Text Style, not Style. None of the Affinity applications retain any record of which Styles have been used in a document.

As for Text Styles, I don't think that it's necessary to ask for a replacement when deleting one, for a couple of reasons:

  1. The "safe" way to delete Text Styles is to choose the action "Delete Unused Styles". Then all the unused ones are gone, and the used ones are safely kept.
  2. If you really want to delete a Text Style that is used, it's easy to do a Find/Replace and pick another one to substitute first. If you don't bother doing that, perhaps a confirmation box would be good ("Warning, that Text Style is used. Really delete?") with Yes and Cancel choices.

-- Walt
Designer, Photo, and Publisher V1 and V2 at latest retail and beta releases
PC:
    Desktop:  Windows 11 Pro, version 23H2, 64GB memory, AMD Ryzen 9 5900 12-Core @ 3.00 GHz, NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3090 

    Laptop:  Windows 11 Pro, version 23H2, 32GB memory, Intel Core i7-10750H @ 2.60GHz, Intel UHD Graphics Comet Lake GT2 and NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070 Laptop GPU.
iPad:  iPad Pro M1, 12.9": iPadOS 17.4.1, Apple Pencil 2, Magic Keyboard 
Mac:  2023 M2 MacBook Air 15", 16GB memory, macOS Sonoma 14.4.1

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6 hours ago, walt.farrell said:

Text Style, not Style

The two would be helpfull, and if the apps were able to retain those information, we would be able to have a new option to modify simples "Styles" that would be usefull, instead of creating a new one and trying to apply it at the object using the previous style.

It would allow the asked for feature: "select items using the same [Style"|Stroke|Background colour…].

 

6 hours ago, walt.farrell said:

As for Text Styles, I don't think that it's necessary to ask for a replacement when deleting one

Accoring to the use I have of DTP apps since the 90’, it's really usefull and needed, we use and do a lot of tricks to reuse documents or part of their styles to not create again the wheel each time, and it can be part of a giant puzzle.

The search and replace panel is the one I don't like because of the need to click on cogs to look at option in differents dropdown menus. ID's panel for this is more user friendly and fast to use. (But other panels are visuals and easier to access than ID's, like the Effects).

Since APub dupplicate easily the Text styles when you import a RTF/DOCX document — there's no way we can have perfect and similar Styles in the 2-3 apps —, and we can't use those imported styles without tweeking or adjusting them.
At some point, when you've created the perfect template with the perfect styles, you need to place/import or paste your RTF/DOCX text in APub, and you end up with all the styles duplicated.
I replaced them with Search and replace… it take time and was a pain. When I had to import again for a second book and do it again, I wasn't really happy about the process. Perhaps scripting will simplify those tasks, for those able to script, but a simple right-click delete-and-replace would have been a luxury and a good option (and we're used to this in QXD and ID).

6 hours ago, walt.farrell said:

The "safe" way to delete Text Styles is to choose the action "Delete Unused Styles". Then all the unused ones are gone, and the used ones are safely kept.

I barely use "delete unused styles": if I create them, it's because they are needed, and it's not because a document won't use the Character style "italic" I created, that the next one won't need it. A template (there's few "one shots" in my work, we have usually many issues of a document) should provide all the needed Text styles, this way, if it's not the creator of the template that work with it, the coworker will find the needed Text style, without needing to create some that wouldn't respect the graphical chart of the document.
That's why you usually have more styles than used, and since you have before hand shown to the client different pages and options, differents master pages and rubrics and styles, "encadrés" (some colorful and specific text frames), the client has validated the principle, and you'll use them only in some issues, but they need to be kept in the template.

The only text styles you need to delete are the ones imported with the text, or dupplicated (after replacing them) by APub, or the ones you created by errors, it happens too :).

6 hours ago, walt.farrell said:

If you really want to delete a Text Style that is used, it's easy to do a Find/Replace and pick another one to substitute first.

I explained this above.

There's a lot of points where tha app isn't user friendly (like the unique Paragraph and Character styles panel, the contextual menu at the top that's unable to show all the options but sometimes hide them and need us to click on a button to check/access some options — no visual and easy step here —, some hidden options like the resized values of objects, no real Object styles we can modify with options like in the Text styles…), and can't provide a smooth workflow.

I play with it for tests and fun on my free time, but I wouldn't have been able to do the work I did in the last months in ID, in the allowed time that needed overtime to respect deadlines.

We don't always have time to work on a template for hours before doing the final projet, or you can have some designer else creating the template but not able to create it with the needed tips and tricks needed in real use.

---

Managing Styles is important, and it should be easy, those options we ask are part of this. And better, at some point a table of concordances for importing or replacing styles would be good.

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On 11/8/2019 at 6:15 PM, walt.farrell said:

The "safe" way to delete Text Styles is to choose the action "Delete Unused Styles".

That is “safe” only if all the styles you might use in the document are already in use, which I find to be rarely true at the stage where I am importing text from another document. In that case, I am rather at the beginning of the process than the end.

It is not that Publisher can’t achieve the same result as InDesign with a different means in this case, it’s just that the currently available means are cumbersome by comparison to what we who are coming from InDesign are used to doing. The more styles one has to import, the more “cumbersome” tends rather toward “tedious.” In my view, there are two design differences between the two apps that result in Publisher’s approach being slower:

1. When importing a style from the source document where a style of the name in the target document already exists, Indesign makes text with that style take on the properties of the style of the same name in the target document, whereas Publisher copies the old style as an additional style into the target document. I find InDesign’s approach much more sensible, because if it is “Body Text” or “Heading 1” in the original document, it is quite likely that the text is still body text and top level heading even in the new document. Usually I would make sure the naming in the old document matches my new document before import so that styles will be adapted to the new with very little effort.

2. The other matter is what this thread is about (though it would be needed far less often, in my uses anyway, if the first difference were addressed). Whether or not Publisher’s find/replace interface is harder to use, the option InDesign provides truly is faster. The following dialog pops up any time you delete a style that is in use:

1021844732_ScreenShot2019-11-11at9_09_40AM.png.774d4d8682d4d1cbaaaf6b0758a550bd.png

 

Regarding the find and replace function in Publisher, I too have felt that it is much slower to use, but I haven’t yet understood why. The biggest difference to me is that one cannot save searches for reuse later, so I am constantly configuring the same searches that in InDesign I configure once and save for quick reuse later. Besides that major difference, I am still trying to decide whether it is merely a different layout of options that I have yet to become fully accustomed to or whether there is some inherent issue that makes it slightly more difficult to navigate.

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47 minutes ago, garrettm30 said:

whether there is some inherent issue that makes it slightly more difficult to navigate

From the different apps I use ans used for code and DTP, a powerfull and easy access to search option is really important.

What is new in APub is to list the results (it was also in TextWrangler on OS X), or in other apps, but not in QXP or ID. But its usefullness can't hide the fact than we need a more complex and visual panel that 2 simple inputs and everything else hidden. Being able to see and check options, having tabs is more easy than playing with dropdows menus for a feature we use a lot with text (and perhaps later with other objects).

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2 hours ago, garrettm30 said:

The biggest difference to me is that one cannot save searches for reuse later, so I am constantly configuring the same searches

In Publisher beta 1.8 there's a pulldown for the Find string and the Replace string that will let you recall previous string values. However, it still won't remember formatting information (character or paragraph styles) if those are part of a search or replace operation.

-- Walt
Designer, Photo, and Publisher V1 and V2 at latest retail and beta releases
PC:
    Desktop:  Windows 11 Pro, version 23H2, 64GB memory, AMD Ryzen 9 5900 12-Core @ 3.00 GHz, NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3090 

    Laptop:  Windows 11 Pro, version 23H2, 32GB memory, Intel Core i7-10750H @ 2.60GHz, Intel UHD Graphics Comet Lake GT2 and NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070 Laptop GPU.
iPad:  iPad Pro M1, 12.9": iPadOS 17.4.1, Apple Pencil 2, Magic Keyboard 
Mac:  2023 M2 MacBook Air 15", 16GB memory, macOS Sonoma 14.4.1

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