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[ADe] Select same color / fill / stroke / appearance


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2 hours ago, babmo said:

Changing colors is only one of many uses for select similar. What if I want to move only blue objects around? Make pathfinder operations with them? Distribute them to layers? Change opacity? Etc., etc. For anyone making complex artworks this is a basic feature like I don‘t know, copy & paste. Inventing workarounds (that don’t work) for something like that shouldn’t be necessary at all.

Just to be clear, I don’t disagree! The original topic was about ‘Select Similar’, which is a feature I’d very much like to see, but I was addressing the particular issue of changing similar fills and strokes independently.

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On 1/10/2019 at 3:54 PM, MEB said:

If they felt there was anything new or significative enough to add (disclose) to the discussion they would probably have done it by now.

 

Jesus Christ, this has evolved one of the most commented topics in the "Suggestions for Affinity Designer on Desktop" subforum.

This has been 4,5 years since the initial post, this is kind of infuriating: I don't know about the compound of your user base, but I hardly can imagine, that all of them would be solely graphic designers. I myself is an architect, which is very related to drawing stuff, but Affinity Designer is not my main tool, but I have it to complement my workflow, to make competition drawings fancier, to clean things up, etc. But I cannot do this, because after importing such PDFs/SVGs (ehm, DWG support?), it takes an insane amount of time to order things to a managable manner: in Illustrator, we had the "select same" options. I will go further: this is the "standard" of the selection process to me, this is a screenshot of ARCHICAD. I'm not going to expect this to happen, because this software is over 30 years old now and costs a few magnitude more than any of your products:

775628581_Screenshot2019-01-1203_30_23.thumb.png.159a3899394a56ca1ad066c779ffaea9.png

 

But to confuse the need for such things with global colours show, that not even the user base has the proper idea why this is important. Yes, if I create documents from scratch, I can use them, but lets say I have a masterplan with tens of thousands of lines, where colour, linetype, thickness can be the differentiating thing, please don't expect me to manually select all the "dashed red hairlines" in my file, because that's just not cutting it. Speaking of cutting: I guess some other out there is dealing with laser cutting from time to time, where the intensity and the speed can be controlled with colours with many machines. If I have a file (again, created in an external source), I would like to recolour everything to the necessary colours. The use cases of this feature would not be  "in-the-application" workflow, rather "to-the-application" workflow, when you don't have an illustration set up in Designer's terms. Right now, it is painstakingly manual. 

To sum it up, there is a plenty of people out there willing to support this company, because Adobe is not feasible for them. Many of these are supposedly not graphic designers. If you are not going to implement features, that are important for them, it is completely fine with me, but the lack of meaningful feedback makes people fed up. It seems to me, that there is a tendency for me to find features that are not "artistic" and has no love on the development side. I understand that you are developing a fairly new set of products, which has unforeseen delays and complications, but what I miss is the feedback. Right now there are no input from the development here, if someone would explain the situation why its not yet done, why it won't be done, what are the more important things, focus areas for you, then it is fine. But that is by far not the case!

 

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Hi furtonb,
Thanks for your comments. I don't know where the confusion with global colours comes from. I never said global colours were a substitute for selection by attributes - because they aren't. It does provide a way to change the colours of objects that share the same global colour without selecting them all first - which can be useful for certain situations - but it's limited to just that particular use case - selection by attributes is a different feature entirely. With that cleared, i don't know what else you expect us to say regarding more feedback. We acknowledged the need for this feature, it was already said that it's planed for an upcoming version, anything else is just feeding expectations without having anything concrete to show at this point. Like other features, as soon as it's ready for testing it's added to the Betas for testing/feedback.

 

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Apologies, I think I may have caused the global colour confusion by suggesting it in a previous comment.

I did stress that this only satisfies the single use case of changing the colour of multiple objects (fill/stroke) without having to selecting them - something that if you weren't aware of might save you some time.

In hindsight perhaps I shouldn't have muddied the thread topic. My bad.

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Hi MEB,

Thanks for the feedback. The global colours were mixed into this discussion by others in the previous replies. I don't expect anything at this point regarding this feature – this thread has been going on for multiple years without any concrete promises, which renders it clear to me, that I'm not in your primary audience, which is acceptable to me, as I do my drawings elsewhere primarily. I had similar feelings with this thread as I had with the ones prior to Affinity Publisher's release – there was no clear communication to the release dates, those being pushed over and over, nor is it clear to me, that anything will happen soon: yes, it could be certain, that Designer 21.3 will have some feature that makes it possible to do something similar than the "select same". That's something I expect to hear from our politicians. Jokes aside, sorry.

I think there had been mentions about the way the Corona development is happening: they have a very clear Trello timeline about the expected deadlines and features to be implemented: https://trello.com/b/dgI8vjDb/corona-road-map-cinema-4d

I know it is a different field with a different scope, but to answer your question, I would expect something like this. Right now you offer insight in the form of this thread: https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/topic/842-affinity-designer-feature-roadmap/

I understand that you have other priorities, and I am in no position to expect you to change this. I am working in a completely different field, where the promised scope and the expected deadline come hand in hand, not in the form of "it's done when it's done", even if it comes to maintaining support.

Another perspective of mine on this: if someone would be in the need of cleaning up externally created drawings, he/she would instantly see the desperate need for this feature, where this could save ridiculous amounts of work. I work with a lot of software on a daily basis, for a ~seamless workflow I am using some kind of built-in selection tools, Designer being left outside the circle for this reason. Anything else basically has a workaround, or Designer is more than capable of doing, making other files workable is not doable with the time constraints I usually have. But we are talking almost half a decade gone since the initial wish. With this in mind, I flip your question: I don't know what else do you expect from your users in this thread.

 

edit: grammar

MBP 15" + iPad Pro 10,5"

macOS High Sierra 10.14 | iOS 13 | latest Affinity Photo & Designer & Publisher (and Betas)

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I will chime in here, as new to Designer, and, I am hopeful, a recovering Illustrator user.

Until I had to search for - and fail to find - the "Select same <attribute>" function, I was fully committed to making Designer my only vector drawing tool - purchased the full edition, bought the book, thought I was in heaven. But now, seeing that this often-requested and >necessary< function has been on the wish list for going on five years, the bloom is off the rose. That it's not even on the time line is a deal-breaker.

Devs: please consider that there is a wide variety of use cases for Designer, and each user has unique needs, but the basics >must< be included for this to be a viable product.

/rant

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Well, unlike some other features requested in these forums by many folks, this has been confirmed to be planned for development. So, it's a matter of time (I know, but at least is on the production line). :)

Best regards!

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  • 4 weeks later...

Wow, four years. Guys please implement that asap. This is so essential when doing vector stuff and already are deep into groups, layers, and sublayers with groups. When will this be in a beta? Shouldn't be too hard to implement as sometimes already pointed out in this thread.

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  • 2 weeks later...
On 1/16/2019 at 1:17 PM, Mithferion said:

Well, unlike some other features requested in these forums by many folks, this has been confirmed to be planned for development. So, it's a matter of time (I know, but at least is on the production line). :)

Best regards!

As someone who creates generative designs with 1000s of objects, it's nice to know that this feature will finally make an appearance at some stage, as without it I'm simply unable to use AD.

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1 minute ago, hillmark said:

As someone who creates generative designs with 1000s of objects, it's nice to know that this feature will finally make an appearance at some stage, as without it I'm simply unable to use AD.

Don't hold your breath, it could be another 4 years at the current rate.

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Just now, B4ttleCat said:

Don't hold your breath, it could be another 4 years at the current rate.

Was just digging a bit further to see whether I could find any more info about a possible ETA when I got your reply. I guess folk are split between Adobe Illustrator and AD until some of the deal-breakers finally make an appearance.

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  • 3 weeks later...
  • 4 weeks later...
  • 2 weeks later...
On 1/10/2019 at 3:54 PM, MEB said:

Some features depend or are tied to other work/parts of the software that may still need to be finished or that aren't yet working as we hoped for. Some may require some research or rewriting a large part of the code or may even en up not working/performing well enough and must be postponed for some reason

Hi. Back on this thread for a check, I found MEB's above 'explanation'. Thanks for that. It seem to vindicate my earlier hypothesis that devs initially chose a data structure that makes selection by attributes very impractical (thus very slow). Sorting this mess out would mean rewriting most of the code, a formidable task that would not offer clear benefits to the existing users of AD (compared to adding fancy 'creative' features). So my hunch is that AD 1.x will never have selection by attributes. And it's not even obvious whether AD 2.x will have the different internals that could allow it.

All in all, I won't waste my time any more with AD. Too bad, on paper, it seemed cool.

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On 1/12/2019 at 3:46 AM, furtonb said:

I myself is an architect, which is very related to drawing stuff, but Affinity Designer is not my main tool, but I have it to complement my workflow, to make competition drawings fancier, to clean things up, etc. But I cannot do this, because after importing such PDFs/SVGs (ehm, DWG support?), it takes an insane amount of time to order things to a managable manner: in Illustrator, we had the "select same" options. I will go further: this is the "standard" of the selection process to me, this is a screenshot of ARCHICAD. I'm not going to expect this to happen, because this software is over 30 years old now and costs a few magnitude more than any of your products:

Yep, I'm in a similar position, working in an architectural office. I already heavily advertised the Affinity suite to my boss, but missing features like this prevent it from gaining foothold in that business.

 

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I sincerely hope that this feature is coming soon. in my line of work, and as I see it in this post that there are many more, this feature is an essential part of keeping files clean. Two years ago I used a test version of AD and really was hoping that the select attributes feature will come soon, which still is not the case. My way of supporting to a hopefully soon implementation of the feature was buying AD.  You guys do a great job. Please don't forget about the needs of your users!

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