Appearance Studio minor issues

[leshido]

Just updated to 1.7 - overall a really impressive update with many new useful features. Thanks!

While playing around with it, I noticed 2 small issues:

1. The icons at the bottom of the Appearance panel are nearly invisible on light UI. See image attached.
2. The behavior of the stroke options "Draw stroke behind" and "Draw stroke in front" is confusing: Normally, it seems to implicitly override the order of fills/strokes as they appear in the Appearance panel. However, if I add another stroke it sometimes causes the stroke to move to the bottom or top of the stack, usually only after selecting another stroke in the panel. Overall I find the option is now obsolete since we have much more control over the draw order with the appearance panel.

[Sean P]

Hi leshido,
The first issue is a known one that is with development to be fixed - I'll get it bumped with them. Regarding the Draw Stroke options are you able to do a screen recording demonstrating the behaviour you are seeing. As far as I'm aware it should send the currently selected Stroke to the back (or front depending on what you select), and any new stroke should follow the last selected option. For example if you have sent the stroke behind the object any newly added strokes will appear behind.

[Hangman]

Regarding the second point, I'm not entirely sure but I think leshido may be referring to the fact that when you change the stroke order to either 'Draw stroke behind' or 'Draw stroke in front' the stroke 'layer' order doesn't change in the Appearance panel until you either click outside the appearance panel, i.e. on the page or artboard or until you click on the stroke item a second time in the Appearance panel. I think the expectation is that the 'layer' order would change automatically as soon as you change to either 'in front' or 'behind' rather than having to click either a second time on the stroke in the Appearance panel or on the canvas, at least that's how I'd expect it to work.

There also seems to be a possible screen redraw issue when adding a second stroke to a shape, the corner of the second stroke changes in appearance as you either zoom into the artwork and when you keep the artwork at the same zoom level but change the width of the second stroke. The attached shows the effect when zooming in but it is the same when changing the stroke width at a fixed zoom. Notice the initial black stoke isn't affected, only the additionally added orange stroke.

[Sean P]

20 hours ago, Hangman said:

Regarding the second point, I'm not entirely sure but I think leshido may be referring to the fact that when you change the stroke order to either 'Draw stroke behind' or 'Draw stroke in front' the stroke 'layer' order doesn't change in the Appearance panel until you either click outside the appearance panel, i.e. on the page or artboard or until you click on the stroke item a second time in the Appearance panel. I think the expectation is that the 'layer' order would change automatically as soon as you change to either 'in front' or 'behind' rather than having to click either a second time on the stroke in the Appearance panel or on the canvas, at least that's how I'd expect it to work.

There also seems to be a possible screen redraw issue when adding a second stroke to a shape, the corner of the second stroke changes in appearance as you either zoom into the artwork and when you keep the artwork at the same zoom level but change the width of the second stroke. The attached shows the effect when zooming in but it is the same when changing the stroke width at a fixed zoom. Notice the initial black stoke isn't affected, only the additionally added orange stroke.

stroke screen redraw.mov

Thanks for that - unfortunately initially I wasn't seeing that behaviour as I was usign the Stroke Panel, but I then used the Stroke Flyout on the Appearance Panel and was able to reproduce that. I'll get that passed on to development. 

The other issue looks to be caused by a low mitre value. If you increase the mitre on that stroke it should stop flickering like that. However the flickering has been reported to development.

[Hangman]

Hi Sean,

I think you could be right regarding the mitre value. It seems when you draw any shape in AD the 'default' mitre value is set to 1.5 but when adding an additional stroke using the Appearance panel the default mitre is for some reason set to 1.414. If instead, this was also set to 1.5 then the problem goes away.