New Colours Added to Colour Bar

I’m hoping there might be an answer to a question regarding the colour bar in Xara Photo and Graphic Designer.

In a number of graphic programs I’ve notice that as soon as a new colour is chosen on the screen that colour immediately appears on the colour line. In some programs they call it the default colours for that project.
This is so handy if you want to choose that same colour for another object in the same project.

I know there is the ability to “name” colours in Xara and then use them again in that same project but that is an extra step and I have no need to “specifically name new colours” , especially for small projects. I think these named colours show up as square boxes on the colour line.
I liked to see any used colour to automatically show up on a colour line as a square or a circle or any shape to distinguish them from the standard colours.

In CorelDraw for example, as soon as you pick a new colour, that colour immediately appears on it’s own colour line for use again within the project- so quick and easy, without having to name the colour.

Just wondered if Xara had that feature. If not, no problem, just a question. I have looked high and low on the internet but could not find an answer to that question.

Thanks,
Harry

if you go to the name gallery 'used colours' you should see a list - if there is nothing there, click on one of your coloured objects in the workspace, and the list shoud refresh

the colour gallery will show named colours under your document title folder, but not the unamed ones; the name gallery should show both kinds

It does already.

Create a new colour and apply to a shape.
Add another shape with Red applied.

Select the first shape. Its colour is available in the Colour Bar in the inner of the first icon.
Click on that colour and drag onto the Red shape.

This allows you to create a colour swatch off-page and simply select a project colour and repeat the above.

Obviously, if you are not even inclined to do this, just click on a shape and the project colour and repeat as above.

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The"proper" and sane way to do this is to create your Project Palette, all with named colours and save just this as ProjectX_themecolorscheme.xar.

Thereafter, just drag the file from an Explorer view onto your design page.
Naming it Somethingthemecolorscheme.xar loads the Named Colours instead of the file contents.

A no-brainer for use with a client.
"Which colour scheme do you like? The one on the left, the one on the right, or these twenty three others?"
I have 18,142 such .XARs from all my XDAs; not one is a .WEB, despite the Xara explanation.

Acorn

P.S. Thanks to Egg for pointing out the themecolorscheme method. See fuller details from the Pro+ PDF Help Manual.

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Colour Handling 199 : Creating your own colour schemes
It’s very easy to create your own colour scheme files, which you can pass on to other Designer Pro+ users for them to apply to designs created with the same theme.




1. Load one of the page templates for the theme. Choose one which shows off all the colours of the theme most effectively. You can add more elements to the page if required, to help show off the range of theme colours.
2. Edit the named colors of the theme one at a time, as described in the ‘Editing named colours’ section (on page 202) below.
3. Once you are happy with your new color scheme, use "FILE" > "SAVE AS" to save it.
The filename you choose MUST include "themecolorscheme" as part of the filename. That is how Designer Pro+ identifies colour scheme files – just by looking for that sequence in the filename. It’s a good idea to also include the name of the theme to which the scheme applies. For example a new blue colour scheme for the "Beta" themeset could be named something like "betathemecolorschemeblue.web".
To test your colour scheme, drag and drop it from File Explorer onto a page that still has the default theme colours. The page should be instantly re-coloured using your colour scheme.

This is slightly different, but I have a palette of custom named colors that sits just off my default page. So every new document shows this palette in the color line.

Thank you Gary, Acorn and Handrawn. I have appreciated the input and suggestions. I think Acron's insight into using the existing colour on the far left of the color bar to create an off page colour palette was the most helpful for me in this situation. All suggestions were appreciated - thank you.

always good to have options :)