Multiple selections?

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Karela

Is it possible to select multiple items and change them all?

For example, I am doing a time-table layout with differently coloured boxes depending on the activity. I did the same one last year, but this year's colour scheme is different. I would like to select all the green boxes and turn them purple, but when I select them, the option to change colour is greyed out. Likewise, I often want to select multiple text boxes and change them all to a certain font, but am stuck doing it one by one.

utnik

hi karela

working with multiple selections is a bit tricky, but possible.
you need to open the appropriate tab in the 'preferences' window with only one item selected and then 'shift' select the other ones. as soon as you swith to another tab, all the options will be grayed out again.
i wouldn't call this behavior user friendly – you might file a report on bugs. scribus.net...

but – you shouldn't need to deal with this sort of problems to change a font. if you have to, it's because you don't work with paragraph styles. direct formatting for more than onepage layouts is a bad habit and leads to a lot of unnecessary work and to avoidable errors!

utnik

Karela

Thanks Utnik! Not user friendly, for sure, but is the bug reporting for this kind of thing as well?

Once I get going I use a paragraph style, it is more in the early planning stages, when I want to select several of the boxes on a page and see what they would all look like in 5 or 6 different fonts that I go a bit click crazy. Also, to change your boxes to said paragraph style, you still have to select them one by one...

So, if I understood well, to change multiple text boxes to a new font, I need to select a box, open the text tab in the properties inspector and then shift-click the next box? When I do that the properties inspector always just returns to XYZ.

Yet, when I do that with two squares and change the colour, it works like a charm...

GarryP

Karela, for colours I'd advise creating some user-defined ones and naming them semantically.

For instance, create a colour called "Activity 1" (or whatever) then apply that colour to whatever you want. Then, when you need to change the colour for that activity, just edit the colour and it will automatically change throughout the document wherever it's used.

As for fonts, utnik's suggestion of using paragraph styles is good but I'd advise creating character styles first and then paragraph styles based on those character styles. That way you'll have more control. You can then test different "looks" using only a few clicks in the Styles editor. (Change the style and everything that uses it will automatically change.)

You can't make formatting changes to multiple text frames at the same time unless you use styles.

Karela

Thanks GarryP!

I always assumed that the paragraph style included a character style- how is it different when you "base" it on another character style? For example, one thing that is tricky for me at the moment is that if there are any italics and/or bold characters they are lost the moment I apply my style because it says everything should be "regular". Could this be set to NOT define the style (bold, italic, regular) of the font but to just use what is there?

I have a lot of other questions re:bold and italic, but I think it might be more appropriate to start a new topic since it is no long what the subject line suggests...


GarryP

If you create a character style to base another character style on then - theoretically - when you change the base character style the styles based on that base style should change automatically.

For example:
* Create a character style "Article" as Arial Regular 10pt Black.
* Create another character style based on "Article" calling it "Person's Name" and change the colour to "Blue".
* Create a paragraph style "Article" based on the character style of "Article'.
* Format the paragraph with the "Article" paragraph style.
* Highlight peoples' names and format them with the "Person's Name" character style.
* Edit the "Article" character style and set the font to "Minion" and the "Person's Name" style should automatically be set to "Minion" and "Blue".

Which is all well and good.

However, and here's why I said "theoretically" near the start, some changes aren't carried through automatically.

For example, if you start with "Arial Regular" in the base style and "Arial Bold" in the derived style and then change the font in the base style to "Minion", Scribus won't automatically change the font in the derived style. You need to change that yourself. Scribus isn't clever enough to check the new font to see if it has a bold variant and automatically make the switch. This usually isn't a huge problem and making the change is way quicker than manually formatting stuff but it needs to be taken into account.

Even though it isn't perfect it's better to create character styles and base paragraph styles on them than to format things directly.

Also, if you don't use the default formatting styles you don't have the problem where if you move your document between different systems you could have different default fonts if the systems don't share fonts. It might be Arial on one machine and Open Sans on another. You can't know so it's best to be specific from the start and Scribus will tell you when you load the document whether you can use the font. It's just an extra little safety net.

harinezumi

Hello, I'm trying to change multiple textbox's style in one go - but I can't. The style selection dropdown menù in the properties/text panel is grayed out as soon as I select more than a text frame.
Notice: I'm working on a calendar where every day may have more than one text frame
(1.5.2)

GarryP

Styles are applied to either characters (Character Styles) or paragraphs (Paragraph Styles), not text frames. The text frames themselves have no text styles applied to them.

If you try to apply a style when a text frame is selected this is a shortcut for "apply this style to all of the text within this frame". This includes any text that flows out of this frame when it's in a chain.

Point to Remember: Text styles are applied to text, not frames.

Set-up your styles to apply the correct formatting to the text - heading; price; author; day-of-week; etc. - then apply the styles to the text as appropriate. Once the styles have been applied you then only need to change the style to change the text formatting across the document.

mmarc

GarryP: "You can't make formatting changes to multiple text frames at the same time unless you use styles"

I understand the benefits of using paragraph and character styles, this is really a much more professional way of working BUT, it seems to me that Scribus SHOULD allow formatting changes to multiple text frames at the same time instead of force users to use styles.
I'm a totally noobie with Scribus but I'm experienced with other layout editors, and I can say this is a common feature which can be very helpful.

Maybe I can suggest this new feature for future releases.

Thanks
Marc

GarryP

Welcome to the forum Marc.

I agree that being able to change the formatting of the text in multiple frames at the same time can be useful but I'm not sure that Scribus should allow it in the way that Karela wrote about.

Styles do the job but they're not very easy to use. For instance, managing styles is in one place and applying styles is in another place. If there was a way to easily create a style from the formatting of the text where the cursor/selection was, and then apply that style to other text then it would be better. And being able to modify a style without the extra dialog - taking up a lot of screen space so you have to keep opening/closing it - it would be even better still.

Applying styles to text is the best way to make formatting changes in multiple frames but it's not easy to do at the moment. If it was easier then it might remove the need to apply formatting across multiple frames.

Just another way of thinking about it.

regit

#10
Quote from: GarryP on June 07, 2015, 04:42:19 PM
If you create a character style to base another character style on then - theoretically - when you change the base character style the styles based on that base style should change automatically.

However, and here's why I said "theoretically" near the start, some changes aren't carried through automatically.

For example, if you start with "Arial Regular" in the base style and "Arial Bold" in the derived style and then change the font in the base style to "Minion", Scribus won't automatically change the font in the derived style. You need to change that yourself. Scribus isn't clever enough to check the new font to see if it has a bold variant and automatically make the switch. This usually isn't a huge problem and making the change is way quicker than manually formatting stuff but it needs to be taken into account.

Although this is an old message, it deserves clarification.

This supposed problem of inheritance prefaced by "theoretical" is no problem at all; it is exactly how inheritance should work.

First, at least in version 1.4.6, when you define a new style (the CHILD) and base it on another style (the PARENT), the CHILD is displayed indented under the PARENT in the Style Manager

PARENT: The style that is the base for other styles.
CHILD: The style that uses the PARENT style as its base.

If you make no changes at all to the CHILD style, then every change you make to the PARENT style is inherited (and therefore implemented) by the CHILD style. So the result of applying either the PARENT style or the CHILD style are exactly the same.

There are two major points of having a CHILD style--it avoids copying a lot of the style settings into a new style; it enables the PARENT and CHILD styles to have some style settings that are the same that can be changed in both by changing the setting in the parent, and some other style settings in the CHILD that when changed, affect only the CHILD style and not the PARENT style. Unfortunately, Scribus does not have any method to distinguish in the CHILD settings which are inherited and which have been changed in the CHILD; you must flip back-and-forth between the PARENT and CHILD (or else write down the settings of one of them) to determine what is changed in the CHILD.  :(

Example
PARENT  You define BodyText as family: Times New Roman, size:12, fill color:black, style:regular
CHILD  You define a new style named Captions. When you start to edit Captions settings, you find they are exactly like the parent settings, as they should be. But you want a sans serif font, so you change the family setting to Helvetica. When you viewed samples of BodyText and Captions, you decided Captions size is a little bit too big, so you change the size to 10. So now Captions is family:Helvetica, size:10, fill color:black, style:regular.

At some later time, you decide that you want BodyText to be blue, so you edit its fill color to blue, and both BodyText and Captions to have a size of 11, so you edit the BodyText size to 11. So what happens? The color of both fonts is now blue, because Captions inherits its color from its PARENT, BodyText.  But you did not want Captions to be blue, you wanted it to remain black. So you now must edit Captions to fill color: black.

And what happened when you made that font size 11 in BodyText? Notice that BodyText is 11 as desired, but Captions did not change. This is because you previously set Captions size 10, so it no longer inherits from BodyText. Therefore, you must edit Captions to size:11.

utnik

hi regit

Quote from: regit on February 17, 2018, 07:02:55 PMUnfortunately, Scribus does not have any method to distinguish in the CHILD settings which are inherited and which have been changed in the CHILD;

take a closer look at the 'style manager' !
the settings you change in the child style are displayed in bold, while inherited settings are displayed in a regular font face.

utnik

regit

Quote from: utnik on February 18, 2018, 01:18:50 AM
hi regit

take a closer look at the 'style manager' !
the settings you change in the child style are displayed in bold, while inherited settings are displayed in a regular font face.

utnik

I am running 1.4.6 with Windows 8.1. I assure you, there are no changes in the way the settings are displayed in the PARENT vs the CHILD in my Style Manager.

Nermander

See these two screen snapshots I just did in Scribus 1.4.5.

[attachment deleted by admin]

regit

OK, I see the problem now. In the Style Manager, there is a tab named Character Style. My expectation, which I think is totally reasonable, is that when I create a CHILD style from the Properties tab using Based on:, it will inherit ALL of the "style" properties, which would include all of the properties found in the tab Character Style.

Alas, this is not the case!!! If I want to ensure the same Character properties for both PARENT and CHILD, then I must apply a  Character Style for both the PARENT and the CHILD.  :o Even when I define the PARENT Character Style Based On as  Default Character Style, it is not automatically applied to the CHILD style; the CHILD's Based On: value remains empty, but I expect it to automatically be set to the same Character Style of its parent. I must manually edit the CHILD's Character Style for the Based On: setting. After that, any changes to the Character Style settings indeed are displayed in bold.