Hi,

I might be missing something here, but I can't for the life of me see how to edit swatches with the new gradient editor. With the old dialog, you could right click a swatch, hit edit, and the dialog popped up allowing you to edit it. The new editor is an "in place" editor, but swatches don't necessarily exist on the canvas - so how are you supposed to edit them? Do you have to draw/find a shape that happens to have that swatch in order to edit the colour? That seems a bit clunky. I'd go back to using the old editor but unfortunately the dialog seems to be one of those that XQuartz *still* won't display properly on a secondary monitor space

Cheers,

Lucian

I'm not entirely clear what you mean by "swatches", but it sounds like you seem to have lost the ability to edit the gradient stops. And you aren't alone. Editing gradients is a little different in 0.91, so it's all on-canvas now.

With the Gradient tool engaged, click on a stop (tiny diamond shaped handle on the longer gradient handle (including the beginning and ending stops, which are a square on one end and circle on the other). Once a stop has been selected, you will be able to edit it from the Fill and Stroke dialog. (You may have noticed a lot of similarity between the Fill and Stroke dialog and the old Gradient Editor. They are essentially identical, and I think that's why developers thought the editor wasn't really needed.

However, if that's not to your liking, I discovered a way to get the old Gradient Editor back. First, double-click on the Gradient tool button, to open Inkscape Preferences > Tools > Gradient and check "Use Legacy Gradient Editor". After you do that, and with a gradient selected on the canvas, you can click the Edit Gradient icon/button in the Fill and Stroke dialog, and the old Gradient Editor will open.

Hi Brynn,

Thanks for your reply. I do understand how to use the new gradient editor, and for normal gradient editing, I actually like it better than the old editor. The problem comes with swatches. Swatches are a feature for having per-document colour palettes - check out the Fill/Stroke dialog and you will see a button just after the pattern button. (Also see http://goinkscape.com/custom-color-pale ... -inkscape/ for a good guide). They allow you to store named colours that are shared between every object you apply them to. I'm drawing a map, and I have e.g. a swatch for roads, one for major contours, one for rivers and streams etc. The thing is, internally, these are actually stored as gradients (1 stop gradients if you're just using a solid colour), so editing them uses the gradient editor. Using the old gradient editor, that made sense, because it popped up a dialog that let you edit the colours; but the new in-place editor doesn't really make so much sense for swatches, which aren't so closely tied to a particular object on the canvas - and in fact sometimes exist without there being *any* object on the canvas using them.

I was wondering if this was an oversight, or if there's some subtlety to how its supposed to be used that I'm missing. If it is an oversight, my concerns are twofold: 1) the legacy gradient editor will probably go away at some point and 2) I can't really use the old editor easily it because it's one of the dialogs that vanishes into the lost world between Spaces on a multi monitor setup under XQuartz on MacOS X (that's a *whole* other can of worms!)

Cheers,

Lucian

Hhmm, oh I see what you mean now. There may be some info in the Inkscape wiki (somewhere) about that. If you don't find anything, you could try making a "bug" report, asking for a better ability (feature request) for this https://launchpad.net/inkscape. That way, you'll be discussing directly with developers, who are probably more on your level (than me).

So Swatches can't be edited on canvas, like gradients? Hhmm....it seems pretty clear to me. See screenshot.



Are you talking about editing using the Gradient tool? Yeah, I see where the gradient tool can't be used to edit. If it ever could be used, I wasn't aware. I haven't used Swatches much. But when you have the object filled with a swatch selected, the F/S dialog is open below, where you can edit directly.

Edit
It looks like there have been some changes with 0.91, since that tutorial.

Hi Brynn,

You're right - you can of course edit the swatches by changing the colour of an object that has a swatch assigned to its fill or stroke. However, one of the nice things about swatches is that you can set your palette bar at the bottom of the screen to "auto" and it will display your swatches ready for easy use. If you right click one of the colours there, there's an option "edit" which launches the gradient editor to change the colour - and this doesn't make a whole lot of sense with the in place gradient editor. I guess this is more of a usability nitpick than anything else. I'll raise a launchpad issue and see what they say.

{edit] I guess they're already kind of aware that this stuff is a bit odd from a UX perspective: https://bugs.launchpad.net/inkscape/+bug/594443 [/edit]
Cheers,

Lucian

Hi,
Have you found any solution to this, other than enabling the legacy gradient editor?
Thanks!

Spooky thread necromancy - that was a year ago ! . I haven't looked for a while, but IIRC I never found a better way of doing it. Sorry.