Add color from drawing to color line

[Paladin]

Maybe my memory is mistaken, or I'm thinking of one of my other graphics editors, but it seems to me that unique colors used in the current drawing used to be added to the color line. Whether that is true or not, is there any way to select a color from a drawing and add it to the color line? Or modify the color line in any way?

This arises because I could determine no way to easily use the color picker to choose an outline color the same as the fill color of a rectangle. Yes, I could go into the color editor, select "local line color" from the dropdown, and use the eyedropper to select the fill color to be used as line color for the selected object, but that's a royal pain for what should be a simple, straightforward task.

I ran a forum search on "color line" and "color palette," and looked in the Help, but couldn't find an answer to this. Maybe I missed it; if so, kindly point me to the forum message or appropriate Help section. Thanks.

cheers,
paladin

[Odat]

Older versions of Xtreme indeed used to work the way that you mention. They were basically creating a new named color every time you used the color picker to select a color.

In newer versions (3.2 on, as I recall), this is no longer the case. You have to manually create a named color yourself to get it to appear in the color line. In the color editor after you've selected and modified the color the way you want it to, click the little name tag button and enter a name for your color. It will appear in the color line as a square.

In conjunction with this there's a new option in the options dialog (Utilities->Options->View tab) that causes all unused colors in your document to not be saved with the document, so that when you load after saving any colors you made that you didn't use get removed. It's turned on by default, you may want to turn it off to get back the old behavior as well.

[gwpriester]

Welcome to the Xtreme Conference paladin.

[Paladin]

Thank you for your reply, Odat. I followed your instructions and the color was indeed added to the color line. I had already turned off the option to ditch unused colors after reading a message in the forums while researching this issue.

Pardon me for saying so, but as a programmer myself I would consider this to be a usability regression that should have been caught in testing and eliminated. The way it used to work was intuitive (indeed, it required no user intervention whatsoever), and I can see no gain in usability, or any other characteristic, obtained by the change. At the least, there should be a checkbox option in the Options dialog to revert to the old behavior, for those who find it preferable. And the default setting to ditch unused colors seems to me to be just plain stupid. What can be possibly be gained from this?

Anyone on the dev team care to offer an explanation for why these things were changed? Any chance that the old behavior, or at least the option to revert to the old behavior, might be restored in a future update or major version? I mean, at least make the "ditch unused colors" option non-default. And if you absolutely have to require explicit user naming of new colors, how about a pop-up prompt asking the user if they want to create a named color when they create a new one? The pop-up could be activated when the color dialog is closed or when focus shifts away from it. We're not talking about rocket science programming here.

cheers,
paladin

[handrawn]

I hated it when it changed.

Now I would not want to go back.

Making your own palettes up front and explicitly naming colors is actually a much better way to work I think.

I have files from the old days that now seem hopelessly disorganised in this respect....

[Paladin]

Well, you see, there ya go. That's why they make ice cream in so many flavors--different strokes for different folks. You like it the new way, I like it the old way. Hence my suggestion that they make it a user-selectable choice, rather than arbitrarily change behavior that many users may find preferable. I just find that to be kind of a "Microsoftish" attitude.

cheers,
paladin

[handrawn]

Sure, no problem.

I don't think the change is 'arbitary' - I think it is for reasons of good working practice, and with future enhancements in mind. So I just thought it might be worth pointing out that I had found advantage in the disciplined approach.

[raynerj1]

If my feeble old mind remembers correctly, The new behavior of the color palletes was established for better export between Xara and other lessor drawing programs (Ummmm... PS, AI or CD for example). that is just what came to mind when I read this thread. I might have read it here or in the national enquiror. Again, I am relying on my memory, which is not perfect by any means.

[Paladin]

Welcome to the Xtreme Conference paladin.

Thanks, Gary. It's good to see such an active group of forums dedicated to graphics and especially to the Xara family of products. I've learned quite a bit following your and others' tutorials in the workbooks and XaraXone. I've been a member for some time, but heretofore mainly a reader. Thanks for the welcome!

cheers,
paladin

[Paladin]

Sure, no problem.

I don't think the change is 'arbitary' - I think it is for reasons of good working practice, and with future enhancements in mind. So I just thought it might be worth pointing out that I had found advantage in the disciplined approach.

You're no doubt correct that it encourages a more disciplined approach, and it may be that I, too, will come over time to find it preferable to the "old way." I don't now, but anything is possible, of course.

But, that brings up another point, and this may just be due to my orientation as a programmer. Form a developer's point of view, while it is perfectly valid to offer options which may encourage a particular approach to workflow, it is much less so to force those changes on the user. Even Adobe Photoshop, the acknowledged leader in (raster) editing applications, does not do this. In fact, they developed an entirely new application, separate from but closely integrated with their editor, directed at the issue of workflow. I refer to Lightroom.

As a user of many graphics programs, including Photoshop, Corel Draw, RealDRAW Pro, Micrografx Picture Publisher (I love the clone tool), Illustrator (with its unique gradient mesh tool), Xara Xtreme, and others, if they all took the approach of making changes to the fundamental interface which impacted my personal workstyle I would be quite frustrated and far from a happy camper.

Yes, this may be a positive change in terms of encouraging discipline (if one accepts the premise that that is the proper role of the developer/vendor; I don't). And, yes, I may eventually come to prefer working that way (maybe ). I still hold that if the change was to be made, it should have been provided as an optional setting alongside the old behavior, for those like myself who may not choose to exercise the option to employ the new workflow. It would not have been difficult, in programming terms (after all, the existing code had already been written and debugged), and being able to toggle between the old and new behavior would have kept us dinosaurs happy while providing the more disciplined approach to those who want it.

cheers,
paladin