Hi everyone,

This is my first post to the forum... I'm very much in the learning process, and I'm up against an annoying little problem.

I have a preference for using color gestures to adjust my solid paint bucket fill colors -- it's quick and handy for my purposes. However, when I Group a handful of bucket fills into a single object (all of the same color paint), the fill becomes unset.

I'm not sure why this happens, and though I can take a couple steps to restore the fill (restoring it to flat color changes it black, and from there I can color gesture), it would be much more fluent to just be able to Group the multiple fills together and adjust the color right there. If instead of Grouping, I select the multiple fills, the fill doesn't unset and I can of course color gesture at that point -- but then I just have to select everything all over again if I need to go back and readjust the color.

There are obviously a multitude of ways to accomplish my goal of changing the bucket fill colors, but I'd love love love to just go about it via the group-together-then-color-gesture method. Am I being too obstinate?? Thanks in advance for a solution to the problem, or some level-headed "do it a different way" advice!

(PS -- I'm actually still a little unsure of what an "unset" fill actually means, and what it means for a fill to be "inherited"... and can't find the darn answer in the manual or plain old Googling!)

I have no clue what you exactly do to unset the fill when you group some items, but I can try to explain inheritance of object properties.

You have a parent object and its children. So if you group something you create the parent object and if you then set a fill color, all the children (the objects in the group) get that same fill. To access the children in a group press CTRL+Enter when you have a group selected. You can then select objects within a group.

I've been frustrated with groups since 0.48 or 0.48.1. I can't remember exactly when it happened. But it used to be that when you had a group of objects, you could set them to have all the same stroke width. But something happened after one of the recent upgrades, where if you group several objects with different stroke widths, the stroke width shown in F/S dialog is 100.00, and you can't change it. So that you can no longer set a stroke width for a group.

So I've gotten into a slightly different workflow. Select the group, ungroup (from button on command bar, or there's also a key shortcut), change whatever I change, group. Wouldn't that work for you? Or do I not understand what a color gesture is?

The only use I know of for "Unset" color, is that if you want to change the colors of clones, using Tiled Clones dialog, you have to have the original object's color unset. I don't know why a group's color should be unset (....unless maybe you mean a group of clones?). As far as I'm concerned, it should be the same as a multiple selection. Most of the time, I trust the developers to know what they're doing. But occasionally there are bugs. I haven't checked, but perhaps having the group color as unset is a bug? You could look in Lauchpad if you're interested https://launchpad.net/inkscape.

"Unset" is used when some object - and a group is treated as an object - CAN have a paint attribute but DOES NOT.

It is not the same as "None", obviously. A group with no paint attributes can be made up of objects that have paint attributes, but if you assign a paint attribute to a group it replaces all the paint attributes of the contained objects. Notice that you can reenter the group and change the paint attribute of an object without the group's paint attribute reflecting this! And if you paste an object with an Unset fill or stroke into a group that has a fill or stroke attribute, the object is immediately painted with that attribute, but if you paste an object with a fill or stroke into a group with a fil or stroke, the object keeps it original paint attributes!
Some glitches pop up from time to time. Generally groups are best left unpainted but there are certainly some useful applications for this feature. Anyway I believe it's called for in the SVG standard so there's no real choice to be made .

Interesting druban! I've never seen "Unset" fill or stroke exlained like that.

So even though all the objects in a group have paint, the group as an object itself, doesn't? Since it's called for in the SVG standards, I guess there's no use arguing. But it doesn't seem consistent. Any regular "non-group" object CAN have paint, but when it doesn't, the fill is called NONE.

So as has been explained by Druban, grouped objects can have some color information applied to the group itself. The group is not a graphical object but a SVG <g> tag that encloses chosen objects. The group can also have filters applied etc. More or less it works as desired in combination of the colors and filters of the individual objects in the group, that is, by default a group has no fill or stroke color or pattern but assigning such will override the group's member objects. Can't remember if ungrouping restores original object colors or not, certainly would be theoretically possible to if the member object colors don't get physically overridden (in the svg code.) All it would take is for the renderer to always check if group color settings are in effect and apply those for the render, otherwise use individual object color settings.

chriswww wrote:Can't remember if ungrouping restores original object colors or not,....

It does not.