I may be missing something, but I've recently started digging in using the Find and Replace docker in my workflow. I am usually using it to find all objects of one fill color in a selection (usually an RGB or CMYK fill) and wanting to change all of those objects in the selection to a spot color. Most of the time this is within a design that I have items grouped together overall, or certain sections of the design grouped. When I select the design and run 'Find and Replace', I get the 'no objects found' error message. But when I hit the 'ungroup all' button and break everything apart and try again, it works. This breaks my grouping which I can sometimes get around, but from that point in a complex design, but I don't have a reasonable way to get the groupings back the way they were in the design at that point. I've run in to this with fairly complex designs with multiple groupings, but I have also tested simple scenarios with 3-4 simple vector shapes and get the same results. So in the end, the fact I have to ungroup everything leaves me with a design that has the right color, but the entire design is now totally ungrouped and I lose all of my object groupings if that makes sense.
In past versions, I used the GDG ColorClick Extreme macro for this and it was incredibly efficient for making selections within a design by fill color so they could be modified or variations set up quickly and it worked with items whether they were grouped or not. Since this macro's no longer offered, I'm trying to replace it with the built in Find and Replace tool, but was having a hard time with it.
Should Find and Replace work on grouped objects, or am I missing something?
Also, I need to put in a feature request that the "Search Range" in Find and Replace stay with whatever your last selection was rather than always defaulting back to "Current Page" since I always am working within a selection and have to re-check that each time I go to use it.
I only have Version 2018. But my experience has been that sometimes it works sometimes it does not. I was using a color palette with spot colors, and I was just wanting to change from one spot color to another, to create different variants of the layout. This is when it was hit or miss. Recently we switched to RGB profile on our printer, and since using that palette, it seems to function better.Also, Powerclips have an effect on this as well.
Oberon Color Replacer is great for replacing colors the way you describe, and as far as I know it also works with PowerClips and fountain fills.Hasn't been updated in years but the latest version (29.3.8) works fine with most versions of Draw, at least up to version 2020 and probably also the latest ones.Can be downloaded here.
Ronny Axelsson said:Hasn't been updated in years but the latest version (29.3.8) works fine with most versions of Draw, at least up to version 2020 and probably also the latest ones.Can be downloaded here.
Shelby wrote a blog post about modifying that macro: Making Your Favorite Macro / Script Better. That includes some PowerClip capabilities that were not present before.
At the end of that blog post, Shelby has a link where one can download the complete 29.3.9 version.
Thanks Eskimo (and Shelby of course), I thought 29.3.8 was the latest.Small but useful improvements.Had to make a small change in the MainForm code to open Replacer more left-top instead of in the middle of the drawing area, but apart from that it seems to work fine in Draw 2020.