Selecting more than one Used Bitmap or Used Colour at a time in the Name Gallery

[handrawn]

Hi Egg

I see I am being ignored or at least my earlier question to you is [so far] unanswered...

They are not sorted by hue, saturation etc, only by meaningless Unnamed colour names. Your example attachment shows Greens mixed willy-nilly with other shades (Red & Yellow etc.)

another question:

why, if there is no pattern that you can see, do you then assume that the order of colours is willy-nilly? just because they are sorted by name and not by colour attribute? the names are meaningless?, you are sure of that? - I mean, the descriptor of the names may be random, but the sequencing may not be.... just something to think about.. I can only speak for myself and what I used to do...

[Egg Bramhill]

I'm not ignoring you at all HD.
The OP posted:

I don't know if this has been asked before but is there a way to select more than one of the round circles that turn red when you select them in the Name Gallery?

I frequently need to select dozens of colours in files I receive to get at the pertinent bit of information in a file.

Only being able to select one colour at a time is frankly painful.

I have tried all the normal windows tricks of Shift, Control and Alt, but I can only ever select one at a time.

I stated that using Ctrl + Select allows you to select as many colours in the name gallery as you wish, not just one.

There may be some misunderstanding of the OP's aims in his first post. He confirms in later posts that he seems to want to select colours in the Name Gallery similar to how you can do a similar exercise in The Page & Layer Gallery i.e. select a layer and holding down shift, select a layer 10 layers down and all the in between layers are selected.

I've never claimed this is possible. What I've questioned is the use of such a function in a name gallery that has no structure other than to list arbitrary names in numerical order that Xara assigns (Unnamed colour 234 etc.)

For such a feature to be useful you would need to be able to list the colour name gallery by hue and Shift select between similar hues and change all the fills to a single hue.

[handrawn]

egg:

My turn to repeat myself: the use of the ctrl modifiier in addiing to the selection of colours in the name gallery is redundant, it's irrelevant - a simple click does it: have you actually tried that?

the OP said, amongst other things:

Only being able to select one colour at a time is frankly painful

and that is exactly the situation, the selection process is one at a time

this is not the same thing as 'only being able to have one colour selected'

I'm well aware you misunderstood that post, easy to do if you don't read it carefully

And reading said post carefully you see that he has tried all the modifiers and they don't do what he wants - so why not start thinking outside the box?

which leads me to your:

What I've questioned is the use of such a function in a name gallery that has no structure other than to list arbitrary names in numerical order that Xara assigns (Unnamed colour 234 etc.)

For such a feature to be useful you would need to be able to list the colour name gallery by hue and Shift select between similar hues and change all the fills to a single hue.

say I import a traced vector file - if [and it's a big if] all the shapes have unique colour values, then the order in the name gallery is the inverse of the stacking order in the P&L gallery - I understand that this is because the program builds the object stack from the bottom up, listing out the name gallery entries as it goes along; in this special case it is possible to do what the OP wants using the P&L gallery... but in practice life is never that simple, colour values will be duplicated and, as they are, an entry in the name gallery will be 'missed out' as that value has already been covered

now what if this stack of objects represents more than one 'thing' and we need to seperate them out? and the objects that make up each 'thing' are not contiguous within the stack? and, furthermore, the 'things' are not monochromatic and so organising name gallery by hue/saturation/value would not necessarily be of use; might be if each 'thing' had a unique palette, but that would be asking to much as well

there may be hundreds/thousands of these objects, too many to sort out directly in the work space [as the OP said] because you cannot see what you are doing being either zoomed too far out or too far in, so what do you do to seperate them out?

and we should not forget that there could be more than one 'stack' interwoven in the layer - sets within sets

these are often very compliocated patterns, but they are not 'willy-nilly' - seperating them out is seat-of-the-pants - like taking apart a jigsaw puzzle that has been put together wrong, and looking for something that starts to mean something, so unless you know what you are looking for, no it won't make any sense....

thats probably enough for one post...

[For all I know the OP does something different - but this is what I used to do - would often have been easier if xara had imported proper nested layer structures instead of bunching it all together, but there ya go]

[Egg Bramhill]

My turn to repeat myself: the use of the ctrl modifiier in addiing to the selection of colours in the name gallery is redundant, it's irrelevant - a simple click does it: have you actually tried that?

Spot on HD, no need for the Ctrl key

However I still don't understand the requirement for a multiple selector across a range of colours. Perhaps the OP can enlighten us.

[handrawn]

You're a doubting Thomas Egg

all that long explanation I gave and still you cannot see

maybe one day you can teach me HTML [just kidding, life is too short ]

I'll just leave you with this: look up at the sky on a clear night and look at the stars - they are willy nilly points of light, right? or are they in clusters if you care to look for them...

[Dahzee]

Apologies for the delay in replying.

Egg, The reason I need to select all these items is to remove them from the file.

I receive artwork in .pdf format that isn't layered, so when it is brought into Xara, I get every shade as an unnamed colour and also lots of bitmaps.

I work in packaging and therefore I need to extract the tooling guide from the artwork and most times it is multi coloured and can also be a bitmap.

I therefore need to remove all the colours that aren't used for the tooling guide and delete them.

I cannot tell you how badly people create artwork that needs to printed and I need to wade through all sorts of unnecessary information to get to the tooling guide.

I even get tooling guides sent to me that when opened with a .pdf reader show no additional detail, but when opened in Xara, all of a sudden behind loads of clipping masks is most of the artwork!

I can usually tell something is wrong when a file that only has a few black lines on it when viewed in a .pdf reader can be 5 - 10mb in size as opposed to a few kilobytes.

Sometimes the tooling guide has been done in photoshop along with the artwork so it is part of the bitmap artwork and is therefore impossible to remove.

In my original instance I am only using Xara as a cleaning instrument.

Hopefully this clears things up for you.

Please let me know if you need any further clarification.

Cheers Dahzee