Working with graphical styles

In the course of creating parts for comic strips, you will find that you use the same combinations of line, fill, and effects settings frequently. This is especially true if you are creating a parts file like the ones that come with Comic Strip Factory. When you are creating many iterations of every body part in different positions, you want to make sure you are using colors and other graphical attributes consistently.

There are two features to make this consistency easier to achieve. Copy Style and Paste Style allow you to quickly reuse a set of graphical attributes right away, and Save Style As… and Apply Style allow you to reuse a number of different sets of graphical attributes now or sometime later.

Copying a graphic style for immediate use

To reuse a set of graphical attributes you have used in one path in one or more other paths, select the first path and choose Copy Style from the Edit menu. Then select one or more other paths and choose Paste Style from the Edit menu. These commands are like Copy and Paste in that only the last thing copied can be reused, but copied styles can only be pasted into a path that is in a part that uses the same color set as the style was copied from. This means you can’t copy from one parts document and paste into another, and if you are working in a comic, you can’t copy a style from within a Fred Nerd part and paste it into a path in a Root Wiz part. Each color set has its own private style clipboard.

Copying a graphic style and using it later

To do the same sort of thing, but be able to use the graphical style later, and have many of them available to you, you can use Save Style As… instead of Copy Style . Save Style As… is only available in a contextual menu. To get it you can hold down the control key and click on the path whose style you want to save. (See contextual menu in the Glossary for other ways to use a contextual menu.) After you choose this command, a dialog will appear for you to name the style you are saving. Styles are saved with color sets, and must have a unique name within the color set.

To use a saved style, open a contextual menu for the object you want to apply the style to (or multiple objects by selecting them first), go to the Apply Style item, and choose a style from the submenu.

Each submenu items shows a preview of what its style looks like as well as the name of the style.

Saved styles are saved in the document file, so they can be used in future editing sessions, but they can only be used in the same parts file or the same color set in a comic file, like Copy Style and Paste Style .

Editing styles

Once created, saved styles can be edited or deleted with the Edit Styles… command in the Edit menu. This command is always available in a parts document, but in a comic document is only available in the part editor. It edits the styles associated with the current part’s color set.

The Styles dialog can be used to delete, edit, and rearrange styles in the Apply Style menu. The editing controls are the same as in the Properties panel. The text field at the top is used to rename the selected style, and the Delete button is used to delete it. Rearrange the order of styles by dragging them within the list.

Editing a style that has been used does not change the appearance of paths the style has been applied to.