Possibly a bug in "Styles"

[Barry Baker]

I've been working on a setup of a room for which I created a whole bunch of fill styles. So far so good. Then I imported a character with skeleton which has its own set of styles. Now the imported character's styles seem to have replaced all the styles of the original file in the style list, without actually affecting the fills I have already created. Surely, the imported styles should simply be added to the bottom of the list? I can no longer access any of the background styles now.

[Lost Marble]

Did the styles of the room have the same names as the styles of the character?

If I try it here, using different style names for the room and the character, it works just fine. I'll have to experiemtn with using the same names for different styles.

[7feet]

I've had this as a difficulty, and believe I've mentioned it here, but it wasn't quite what it seemed. I've imported objects that already had imported styles. Since the object name is tagged onto the front of the style name when you import, unless you take the time to rename them all everytime you import, the names can get awfully long. The text box listing styles only gets so wide. The names are left justified, and the right side ends up being the end of the longest name. So it's entirely possible (and I suspect likely) that you're original styles are still there, they've just been pushed so far to the left that you can no longer see them in the box. When I've had objects with tons of layers and styles, I have to name things pretty descriptively, and run up against this wall immediately. I only figured it out because I did I imported something, one of the original style names was unusually long, and all I could see was the last few characters peeking out. After renaming all the imported styles to something a lot shorter, I could see my original styles again.

It wouldn't be as pretty, but right justifying the style names would be a quick fix. Of course, it would be nice if the window would size to the longest name.

--Brian

[Barry Baker]

Did the styles of the room have the same names as the styles of the character?

If I try it here, using different style names for the room and the character, it works just fine. I'll have to experiemtn with using the same names for different styles.

The style names are all different. The imported character styles all have had a prefix added to them (by Moho, not by me) "skeleton - " and then the name of the style. The skeleton also has an imported head as part of its structure, and these styles are prefixed by "skeleton - kitty head - " etc. But the room's styles are not there, nor is there the option to create a new style. I must add, that there were a lot of styles in the list already! I wanted to be able to change any colour fill or outline at a whim, so I thought I'd make it easy for myself... I still think it's a great concept.

[Lost Marble]

I wanted to be able to change any colour fill or outline at a whim, so I thought I'd make it easy for myself... I still think it's a great concept.

Not that it helps your current situation, but you can also name shapes. If you find that you're creating styles that you only use on one shape, it may be better to just name that shape instead of creating a style for it.

[Barry Baker]

I didn't realise what shapes was for - I missed that in the manual the first time. I will use it now as well as styles, but as you say - it doesn't help the current situation.

If it helps at all to analyse the problem, there were 27 styles in the background, and 14 in the character. The combined file has kept 12 of the character's body styles, 13 of the head's styles (12 of which are duplicates of the body) plus four styles of a few other objects I imported.

[Barry Baker]

AHA! I just worked out what happened, and it's as 7feet says, with additions. Basically, not only were the imported styles getting longer names (because they were getting long prefixes added to them - which is perfectly sensible, to avoid duplicates), but as the list got longer, Moho split it up into two columns. This is all very good so far, but the problem occurs because the drop-down styles box is clipped by the edge of the style panel, so only the rightmost column is showing. It's just a little bug in the interface. The box needs to be able to spread beyond the confines of the main style panel.

Hope this makes sense.

[Barry Baker]

Thanks to moho files being plain text, I could just edit it using Wordpad. I used Replace to remove all the extra prefixes that Moho had added to my style names (eg. "Kitty skeleton - body mid" becomes simply "body mid"). Then I loaded the file back in and clicked on Styles/delete unused. This got rid of all the duplicates in one go, and although I still have two columns of style names, because they are shorter, I can see more than half of the lefthand column, which is just enough to be able to work with.

I suggest to LM that:

a) Let that box extend outside the border of the Style panel and

b) When importing Moho objects, the program should compare styles of the same name, and if a style shares all the same parameters as the one that is already in the current movie, then there's no need to insert a duplicate. For example, if I have several characters all intentionally sharing the same skin colour, then I don't want that skin colour to be renamed and duplicated for each instance.

But I think the styles are a really useful feature.

[Squeakydave]

Thanks for posting your findings Barry. This is very helpful indeed!