Color line questions

[ZEBtoonz]

I am using Xtreme Pro 3.21 and I have some questions regarding the color line at the bottom of the screen.

1. In earlier versions of Xtreme when you selected a filled in shape the color line would indicate the fill and line color with a little marker on the color swatch--top left was the fill and top right the line. This feature does not seem to be available in the Pro verion. Is there a way to enable this? It's really helpful knowing this information when you are doing a comic strip and have to match the colors from one frame or page to the next.

2. I am using Gary's Palette as my default palette (see attached). I converted it into a JCW file with the recently posted program. Is there any way to have the color swatches appear as squares instead of the little diamond shapes--squares rotated 45 degrees? My only reason for wanting this is that the swatches are a tad larger and easier to see that way. I believe there is some distinction regarding the shape of the swatches: square is named colors(?), diamond unamed, circle are Pantone--or something like that.

3. One last question, it used to be that any colors used in a drawing would appear consecutively in the color line. Is this possible in the Pro version? If so, how do I enable it?

[raynerj1]

hi Zeb,

Under the view tab of the options dialog you can switch the color line back to the ole way by selecting "set line color".

The only way I ever adjusted the colors on the color line is to move em in the color gallery. The ones on top are the ones furtherest to the left.

[ZEBtoonz]

Thanks, John! I already enabled the "set line color" option. But I still have my three questions/problems to try and resolve.

[handrawn]

Hi Zeb

Re your point 1) - the color will appear as a square with the line/fill markers if you make it a named color - this no longer happens automatically under the new way of organising color in xara 3.2. Personally I think this is more work as I do a lot of coloring 'on the fly'.

If you want unused named colors to be kept when closing xara - untick 'delete colors when saving and loading' in options/view tab

[Egg Bramhill]

Zeb,

I attach a xar file I use as my default template with all the old colours as Named Colours and 2 Named colours with 10 shades of that colour each.

[ZEBtoonz]

Thanks, Egg! I actually got things straightened out in the meantime. I had saved Gary's Palette XAR file as my default template with all his named colors, etc. Somehow during my messing around with palettes I had disabled showing his palette but deselecting the colors under "Untitled1." Once I enabled that palette to show in the line, every thing was fine--colors swatches were square and the fill and line markers showed up.

[Egg Bramhill]

That's fine Zeb. The whole of this new colour line thing seems to me a matter of Xara fixing a problem that wasn't broken.

[handrawn]

I agree with that Egg - theres been discussion about it elsewhere on the forums

Zeb - glad you got the palette sorted out

[jclements]

Egg, I think Xara was trying to solve the occurence of duplicate color names (ie., white 1, white 2, etc.) that came when importing one Xara file into another.

I was hoping they'd solved this instead by having a button in the Toolbar ("purge" unused colors). Also, a function where the user (or the software itself) could select color names with the same values and merge them into one name.

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Also be nice if there was a "purge unused layers" button as well in the Toolbar.

[Egg Bramhill]

Hi John,

Yes, I think you are correct. Also under the old system if you used one of the diamond colours these created named colours. Apparently if you used these colours the document would quickly become clogged up with named colours, a lot of which may not have been used in the final document. I never used these other colours, just selected a primary colour from the colour bar and adjusted it using the Colour Editor, so it was never a problem for me.