Should symbol visibility be synced?

[GarryP]

Windows 10 Home 1903, Designer 1.7.2.471.

See attached GIF.

When I have some symbol instances, setting one to be invisible makes all of the others invisible.
However, de-syncing via the Symbols panel, setting some to be invisible and then re-syncing, allows me to make some invisible as a ‘set’ but the others can be made invisible individually.
Is this expected behaviour, and if so why?

Also, there’s no way for me to know - looking at the Layers panel - which symbols have been de-synced. It might be nice for a symbol to tell me - in the Layers panel - that it has been de-synced in some way (maybe a little ‘de-synced’ glyph or something). I know there is a little dashed orange bar to the left of the de-synced elements when I open the symbol but I don’t really want to have to open each symbol to check them.

[walt.farrell]

1 hour ago, GarryP said:

Also, there’s no way for me to know - looking at the Layers panel - which symbols have been de-synced. It might be nice for a symbol to tell me - in the Layers panel - that it has been de-synced in some way (maybe a little ‘de-synced’ glyph or something). I know there is a little dashed orange bar to the left of the de-synced elements when I open the symbol but I don’t really want to have to open each symbol to check them.

You can hover over them, and the tooltip will tell you what is desynched about each symbol.

Apparently, Transform/Constraint are unsynched for all symbols, which I suppose makes sense so you can move them. But it might be nice if those weren't listed. (I wonder if they were listed in 1.6?)

Actually, with a bit more experimentation with visibility I've noticed something interesting. For the bottom symbol I added a stroke to the rectangle. If I expand both those Symbols, I get this:

Note that the top symbol (the one with the tooltip in my first image) does not have a broken line, even though its Visibility/Opacity is unlinked. The bottom symbol, where I changed the stroke, does have a broken line.

What seems to be happening is that changing the visibility of that instance of the symbol (by clicking its visibility box) is not viewed as changing the visibility of the rectangle which is a component of the symbol. So, since I didn't directly modify the rectangle, it still has a solid orange bar. If I create another instance of the symbol, expand it, turn off synchronization, and change the visibility of the rectangle directly, I get this:

 

I agree with you that it would be better to have a better visual indication without having to expand the symbol, and without having to hover to get the tooltip. Perhaps the broken orange line could appear for the unexpanded symbol "group", too, if either it or any of its components was changed?

Certainly if I can change some attribute of the symbol itself (e.g., visibility) and it is tracked at that level as shown by the tooltip, I would expect the orange line to be broken for the symbol layer itself.

[GarryP]

I never even thought about hovering over the layer name but that’s a nice tip (pardon the pun). However, as you say, it would be nice to be able to easily see if a symbol was totally synced or partially de-synced without further investigation.
There are plenty of bug reports and feature requests for symbols so maybe someone will put a bunch of them together and fix/adapt them together. Symbols are a great feature, they’re just not quite as usable as some people want them to be yet.

[R C-R]

9 hours ago, walt.farrell said:

Actually, with a bit more experimentation with visibility I've noticed something interesting. For the bottom symbol I added a stroke to the rectangle. If I expand both those Symbols, I get this:

Note that the top symbol (the one with the tooltip in my first image) does not have a broken line, even though its Visibility/Opacity is unlinked. The bottom symbol, where I changed the stroke, does have a broken line.

I can only get that result (one rectangle with a broken line & the other not) if I first disable Sync for the bottom instance of the symbol or its rectangle child & then change that instance's stroke properties. Otherwise, if Sync is enabled, whatever I do to one instance applies to all of them, just as I would expect.

Where you expecting something else?

[walt.farrell]

1 hour ago, R C-R said:

I can only get that result (one rectangle with a broken line & the other not) if I first disable Sync for the bottom instance of the symbol or its rectangle child & then change that instance's stroke properties. Otherwise, if Sync is enabled, whatever I do to one instance applies to all of them, just as I would expect.

Where you expecting something else?

Of course one has to turn off sync; that was mentioned in the first post in this topic, and is part of all these experiments.

The point was, that changing the stroke while synch is off leaves a record of what was done (broken orange bar, tooltip), but changing the visibility doesn't.

[R C-R]

12 minutes ago, walt.farrell said:

Of course one has to turn off sync; that was mentioned in the first post in this topic, and is part of all these experiments.

The point was, that changing the stroke while synch is off leaves a record of what was done (broken orange bar, tooltip), but changing the visibility doesn't.

I asked because for me, if sync is off changing the visibility of the rectangle does create the broken orange bar & a tooltip saying "Unlinked attributes: Visibility/Opacity." This happens whether on not I also change the stroke width while sync is off, the only difference is then the tooltip says "Unlinked attributes: Stroke, Visibility/Opacity."

Maybe this is a Windows-only bug or something?

[walt.farrell]

Thanks, maybe that part is Windows only.