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


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Since the most requested (based on the reply count) are technical illustration related, it would be awesome to have an official response on all of them, whether we can expect Designer to strengthen this side as well in the future.

To be honest, although I've bought Designer for both macOS and iOS, they are mainly collecting the dust on my virtual shelf, because it is just that pain in the [ ° ] when it comes to dealing with technical drawings – which is basically 90% of my time during any chosen workday. The time required to organise my document to a workable manner (sorting through tens of thousands of different lines, fills, etc.) is not really worth to me. 

I hope though, that this will change in the foreseeable future, if not, please be clear about it.
 

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I just bought the program yesterday but i did not know it does not have such a basic tool. I'm seriously inclined to return it. It's a shame for it has so many nice features. But this one... it's so basic that is impossible to think a vector based application that does not have it. Even inkscape that is a free, has this tool. This might be a simple script to implement. I've been reading this post and it's amazing they keep saying that it's about to come... for years. 

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  • 1 month later...
On 11/10/2018 at 3:46 PM, madtho said:

I'd love to see how other folks are working around it.

Same as B4ttleCat, by using Adobe Illustrator.

There's no workaround to this feature.
You'll have to love manually selecting a zillion of objects without mistake (an interesting psychometric task, sure).

Funny I haven't totaly given up on AD and still checking this forum every 6 months or so. Seeing for how long the issue has been around, I suggest that the moderators should write a sticky post "Tomorrow, AD gets the oft-requested selection by attribute". This would save them some time (ok, not that we get feedback on the issue very often).

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@madtho If you happen to be creating a project from scratch you can workaround having to change colours in multiple places by using global colours within a Document Palette. If, when creating new objects the global colour swatch is used as a fill or stroke colour then you can change this colour later and it will update whereve it is being used in the document. See below:

affinity-global-colour-v2.gif.70878ed25f9cc7c0a056697434846737.gif

The only thing to be aware of is that a global colour isn't a global colour in the strictest sense - the swatch actually has to be active when you're creating new objects. It will, however remain 'attached' to the object if a shape is duplicated (as above).

Of course this isn't the same as selecting by same fill/stroke/appearance but as far as amending colours in a document goes it saves having to essentially go through the same manual process of selecting a huge number of shapes and curves (which would have to be selected separately by whether the colour of the stroke or fill needed changing).

Hope this helps

 

 

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On 1/7/2019 at 5:00 PM, simonlayfield said:

@madtho If you happen to be creating a project from scratch you can workaround having to change colours in multiple places by using global colours within a Document Palette. If, when creating new objects the global colour swatch is used as a fill or stroke colour then you can change this colour later and it will update whereve it is being used in the document. See below:

affinity-global-colour-v2.gif.70878ed25f9cc7c0a056697434846737.gif

The only thing to be aware of is that a global colour isn't a global colour in the strictest sense - the swatch actually has to be active when you're creating new objects. It will, however remain 'attached' to the object if a shape is duplicated (as above).

Of course this isn't the same as selecting by same fill/stroke/appearance but as far as amending colours in a document goes it saves having to essentially go through the same manual process of selecting a huge number of shapes and curves (which would have to be selected separately by whether the colour of the stroke or fill needed changing).

Hope this helps

 

 

That doesn't come close to the only reason why you select same... It's isn't all about changing colours, plus even if that's what you want to do then you often don't want to ruin your colour swatches and what if you want to change, say, blue fills but not blue strokes? Globals can help in a very limited number of cases. But often it's nothing to do with simply swapping a colour, I use it more for selections and stroke weights.

That's why it's such a fundamental tool for a vector app and why it's so disappointing that's it's still not in after getting on for 5 years and seems it won't be in 1.7 either. This plus a list of other things and very little progress being made are making wonder if it ever will be a real AI alternative and whether I'll ever be able to switch to it for my work.

 

Marc

ArtByMarc.me

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35 minutes ago, VectorVonDoom said:

what if you want to change, say, blue fills but not blue strokes?

You just need to make sure that you use separate instances of the same shade of blue.

Alfred spacer.png
Affinity Designer/Photo/Publisher 2 for Windows • Windows 10 Home/Pro
Affinity Designer/Photo/Publisher 2 for iPad • iPadOS 17.4 (iPad 7th gen)

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Quote

That doesn't come close to the only reason why you select same.

@VectorVonDoom It's true - and I wasn't suggesting this is a sufficient replacement for that feature. Select by same colour/fill/stroke appearance is powerful because it allows you to perform number of options once selected. I thought it was worth posting because it covers one of the many use cases that might apply, and global colours are a feature perhaps not everyone would know about.

I'm hanging out for the feature requested in this thread because I've felt the pain of having to select a crazy number of shapes and curves in order to make document-wide amends to complex artwork.

Quote

what if you want to change, say, blue fills but not blue strokes?

Yeah, this involves some manual management of global colours. If it helps, you can show global colours as a list and then rename them to more useful/descriptive terms. See below:

affinity-global-colour-v3.gif.b72060c355d9991f23251541647d0c93.gif

The only caveat here is that if you end up using the 'Face Tone Dark' global colour for something that isn't part of the face then semantically it can get confusing. It really depends on the complexity and level of granular control as to what naming system is most useful.

 

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42 minutes ago, MEB said:

Hi B4ttleCat,
All I know about this feature specifically at this point is that it's planned for an upcoming version, sorry. I have no information about dates or the current state of development.

Being QA/Support and the conduit to the community, is that something you would mind finding out for us, please? I appreciate it's not helpful to the development team to give concrete details but you've told me the same thing as you did in this thread years ago.

Edit: And apologies for being rude: thank you for the reply.

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On 1/8/2019 at 10:26 AM, VectorVonDoom said:

That doesn't come close to the only reason why you select same... It's isn't all about changing colours, plus even if that's what you want to do then you often don't want to ruin your colour swatches and what if you want to change, say, blue fills but not blue strokes? Globals can help in a very limited number of cases. But often it's nothing to do with simply swapping a colour, I use it more for selections and stroke weights.

That's why it's such a fundamental tool for a vector app and why it's so disappointing that's it's still not in after getting on for 5 years and seems it won't be in 1.7 either. This plus a list of other things and very little progress being made are making wonder if it ever will be a real AI alternative and whether I'll ever be able to switch to it for my work.

Logged in just to say "hard agree". Don't know if you care @MEB , but I made this account just to follow and agree to this thread. I left AD a year or two ago now over this one feature. At this point, I don't think I'd even bother returning for fear of finding another basic and essential feature like this that I can see clearly won't get fixed.

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12 minutes ago, VectorVonDoom said:

So how many dupes are you going to have? That's not a realistic solution that would just end up as  a mess.

Why would it end up as a mess? If you have, say, a (global) blue fill and a (global) green stroke, changing either one doesn’t affect the other. So if you were to change the green to the same blue as you used for the fill, you’d have exactly the situation I described and your palette wouldn’t suddenly be deluged with extra swatches.

Alfred spacer.png
Affinity Designer/Photo/Publisher 2 for Windows • Windows 10 Home/Pro
Affinity Designer/Photo/Publisher 2 for iPad • iPadOS 17.4 (iPad 7th gen)

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So you start off with more than one of each colour and have to remember to use the same swatch each time, not too hard in theory but bet you make a mistake. Then you make it worse by, say, redefining a blue to green and having some original green and some new green. And then what if you just wanted to swap blue strokes to green and leave fills alone? I'll let you do it that way but that's not my idea of fun. Plus, like I said, there's more to it than just colour changes. I use it for selections, opacity and stroke widths more than colour swaps, and that's why I count it as a fundamental tool.

 

Marc

ArtByMarc.me

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@MEB And again a year has passed since you wrote "It will come on a future version. Please bear with us." And nothing happened. You see why that's very frustrating, don't you? I love  AD - in 2019 alone I created two DER SPIEGEL covers with it! And yes, I work with global colors when possible. But that's not more than a bad work around! It's like telling people to put a blue and a yellow layer on multiply when they want green! It's just so hard to comprehend why you guys don't realize what a basic MUST this feature is!

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On 1/8/2019 at 10:47 PM, B4ttleCat said:

Being QA/Support and the conduit to the community, is that something you would mind finding out for us, please? I appreciate it's not helpful to the development team to give concrete details but you've told me the same thing as you did in this thread years ago.

Edit: And apologies for being rude: thank you for the reply.

Hi B4ttleCat,
No need to apologise, you weren't rude at all, quite the contrary. Thanks for your concern. Please see my reply above regarding your question.

 

20 hours ago, airguitarbandit said:

Logged in just to say "hard agree". Don't know if you care @MEB , but I made this account just to follow and agree to this thread. I left AD a year or two ago now over this one feature. At this point, I don't think I'd even bother returning for fear of finding another basic and essential feature like this that I can see clearly won't get fixed.

1 hour ago, LennartGäbel said:

@MEB And again a year has passed since you wrote "It will come on a future version. Please bear with us." And nothing happened. You see why that's very frustrating, don't you? I love  AD - in 2019 alone I created two DER SPIEGEL covers with it! And yes, I work with global colors when possible. But that's not more than a bad work around! It's like telling people to put a blue and a yellow layer on multiply when they want green! It's just so hard to comprehend why you guys don't realize what a basic MUST this feature is!

Hi airguitarbandit,
Welcome to Affinity Forums :)

I do care and I wish I could do a little better here regarding yours, B4ttleCat and other users concerns/questions about this and other features, but this is not just about caring. There's things I don't know about or can't disclose, neither I am the right person to do so.

All developers and managers also read and participate on these forums. If they felt there was anything new or significative enough to add (disclose) to the discussion they would probably have done it by now.

Serif/Affinity provides Betas for all of its applications, in all platforms and also lists features planned for each dev cycle of the app (v1, 2 etc). Going further than this means entering in details, suggesting dates or risk creating expectations that we then might not be able to meet. It happened already when we were too optimistic regarding Publisher release date/development and the backlash was considerable. So we try to avoid being too specific regarding features that are not yet finished/ready to be discussed.

If/when developers feel they have something concrete to show/need feedback they create new threads themselves or participate in existing ones replying to users directly. Ben, Dave Harris, Matt and quite a few others have been doing this since the beginning.

@LennartGäbel
Regarding priorities - as explained before - this is not as simple nor linear as it may look. It's not just a question of being a basic feature or not. 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. In some cases we may also have to complete/implement/finish features/parts on the other apps to ensure compatibility/feature parity between them/platforms. There's quite a few things that dictate the order features are added/implemented which are not that clear for someone looking from outside.

The dev teams have been doing the best they can with the time and resources they have. Trying to speed up development just for meeting dates/goals/requests at all cost will just end up leaving everyone frustated - the users will get faulty features and I'm pretty sure devs will not be happy about it as well.

I'm sure if Matt or any other developer have some additional info they can disclose regarding this feature they will stop by and will do so. I will make sure they see/check this thread. Thank you for your patience, support and understanding.

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2 hours ago, Alfred said:

Why would it end up as a mess? If you have, say, a (global) blue fill and a (global) green stroke, changing either one doesn’t affect the other. So if you were to change the green to the same blue as you used for the fill, you’d have exactly the situation I described and your palette wouldn’t suddenly be deluged with extra swatches.

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.

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I know I'm not adding anything meaningful to this thread, and I know more work goes into developing a program than many realize, but the fact that select by color or other attribute isn't an option in Designer is honestly pretty nuts to me. It's a basic and I'd say fundamental feature of this type of application. This not being prioritized after YEARS of complaints seems so strange to me. Add me as another person who won't/can't switch from the Adobe ecosystem until this is added, even though I want to.

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