Layers Poll

[Egg Bramhill]

There's been a very in depth debate within the Forum recently about layers so I thought it would be helpful to get a straw poll of how members use/regard layers. I've left the poll public so members can see who's voting for what.

[steve.ledger]

I use layers when I consider them appropriate.

The sign shop that I worked at for a couple years never use layers.
They're considerable business has done without them for many years and they see no need to bother with them. (All of their software includes layer capabilty however)

[remi]

I would say, requests for nested layers falls in the category "The layers gallery requires a complete overhaul".

Otherwise, there were no reason, why we don't get it within Xara Xtreme (there are requests for that since years...).

Remi

[MEB]

I would say, requests for nested layers falls in the category "The layers gallery requires a complete overhaul".
Remi

Hum, i see nested layers as an improvement rather than a complete overhaul. The actual layers structure works well for simple things. There´s nothing wrong with it. It only shows its limits when we deal with heavy projects. I see the nested layers as the next level for solving the problems on complex work.

For me a complete overhaul would be the layer gallery display all groups (nested layers), layers, grouped objetcs and individual objects along with a preview of them as some programs already do. This offers a lot of control, true, but adds a lot of clutter to the layers gallery too, and i´m unsure if all that "clutter" is really needed.
I´ve tried some of those programs and due to the huge number of items (objects) listed it´s as almost so hard to find the object we want as if there´s no object listing at all.

That´s why i voted "I use layers but feel there's some need for improvement."

[PixelDust]

I voted for "needs some improvement". By that I mean nested layers, object-level locking/visibility options, and thumbnails.

More control would be good, but I hope there would be the option to turn thumbnails and other information off if not needed. Thumbnail size options would also be nice to have.

[David O'Neil]

I would prefer to get some new vector tools before this is attacked--specifically a mesh tool or diffusion curves.

When the layers are redone, I'd like to see a method added to click on an object in the drawing and turn off all layers other than the one the object is on. Another useful method would be to turn off the layer that object is on without having to look at the status line and manually find that layer. Even just having the layer become highlighted in the layers gallery would be a great help.

[MarkMyWords]

I think nested layers; layers which can be expanded to show groups and objects, and groups which can be expanded too, would be a great improvement.

With hundreds of objects, dividing them up between layers helps tremendously, but then tracking down a specific object can occasionally cause frustration. Xara have tried to address this, quite cleverly, with the names gallery. Unfortunately that is not intuitive to use and also requires some fore-thought and discipline in organising an image.

Perhaps some combination of the name and layers gallery, with an auto-naming option (naming each object after the layer it is on and its stacking order?), with tabs to move from layers to objects/groups, colours, bitmaps and fonts.

An option for auto-naming colours would be good too. I often split images up into layers like; flesh, head, body, car-body, gun, etc., so naming a colour after the layer and object would make it straight-forward (at least for me LOL!). Linking colours should be more intuitive too, why can't you drag the colour picker, bring up right click menu and simply choose; tint of this colour?

Sorry, I'm rambling...I vote that layers needs improving asap.

[raynerj1]

Layers could definetly use updating, particuliarily since we have multiple pages now.

[aridzone]

If I could do anything close to what Nicolae does I'm sure iI would be using layers much more often.

http://www.talkgraphics.com/showthre...hlight=nicolae

[GeoBen]

take a look at how other graphic apps handle layers, nesting, grouping, thumbnails...

even the freebie Inkscape includes nesting.

xara is stuck in neutral on this matter and has been for a looonnnnnnnng time.

geo.