A bunch of beginner questions.

[egypturnash]

Hi all! I'm making another attempt to come to grips with Moho after a couple decades of Illustrator. I fooled around with it last summer and bounced off of it; this time I feel like I'm maybe getting a bit closer to finding a way to use it that lets me just open it up and start drawing and animating stuff with a level of freedom similar to just throwing some paper onto pegs and drawing stuff. Which is good. But I have some questions.

I'm using Moho Pro 14.2 if this makes any difference.

Questions about selecting stuff.

1. Is there an equivalent to Illustrator's select>same menu? I find it super useful to be able to draw some shapes on a layer, then later come back to the layer, select one shape, and do things like "select same style", "select same fill color", "select same stroke weight", and so on.
2. Why does edit>select all only work when I'm selecting points, not shapes? This one's driving me insane. I really hope I'm missing something obvious here, shift-scrubbing across the entire drawing with the Shape Select tool can't be the only way to do this, can it?

Questions about drawing.

1. I am really missing Illustrator's "draw in front/behind" feature. This lets you choose whether new shapes are generated at the top of the current layer, or at the bottom. This sounds trivial but in practice I find it saves a lot of effort to be able to draw stuff and not fuss with going back and selecting/depth arranging it. (Ways to select a handful of shapes and move them all in front of/behind the nearest/rearmost shape, as well as to reverse their depth order, would be helpful too - I have scripts for that in Illustrator, has anyone done those for Moho yet? If someone has, I can't figure out the right things to search the scripts site for.)
2. Is there any way to use the Freehand tool to edit parts of a selected path? This speeds up finessing shapes a lot for me. No worrying about individual points or accidentally moving around points from another nearby path, just select the path and draw over part of it.
3. Is there any way to edit the pressure curve of a stroked path after drawing it?
4. Is there any way to make the auto-stroke/fill checkboxes of the Freehand tool operate, well, automatically? Like if I have two styles, one with a fill and no stroke, the other with a stroke and no fill, I want to be able to just select the first style, freehand out a shape that has the desired fill and no stroke, then select the second style, and freehand out another shape that has a stroke and no fill, without having to interrupt going between the style dropdowns and the canvas by toggling the auto-stroke/fill checkboxes. I don't want to think about whether the current style has a stroke and/or fill at all, I just want to say "okay now I want to draw a shape in the Alba's Head style". (Really I want this to apply to every drawing tool, if I'm drawing a rectangle with the Shape tool or building a shape with Add Points then I want the fill and stroke to just show up as appropriate to the current style, too.)

Questions about styles.

1. Can I tell a style with a gradient that I always want that gradient to be at a particular angle, or do I have to manually set the gradient for every shape I draw? At least defaulting to straight up and down is better than Illustrator's default of left-to-right, I almost never want that but I often want a vertical gradient for shading...
2. aaaargh why is finding accidental keyframes that change styles such a giant hassle, I found a workaround in a seven-year-old forum post here but aaaarrrgh why don't these show up as keyframes in a "style" channel that I can turn on in view>timeline channels and have automatically show up wherever I am in the layer hierarchy when a key's generated, this drove me crazy for like a half an hour today.

That's about it for now.

[SimplSam]

...
Questions about selecting stuff.

1. Is there an equivalent to Illustrator's select>same menu?
   -- No. But good idea and is possible in add-on/modified script.
2. Why does edit>select all only work when I'm selecting points, not shapes?
   -- Apparently this depends on the current layer type and not the selected tool. Use the [Select All] button on Shapes tool instead.

Questions about drawing.

1. I am really missing Illustrator's "draw in front/behind" feature.
   -- Possible in add-on/modified script. The Blob Brush tool has this feature, so maybe one day.
2. Is there any way to use the Freehand tool to edit parts of a selected path?
   -- No, but interesting.
3. Is there any way to edit the pressure curve of a stroked path after drawing it?
   -- You can use the Line Width tool.
4. Is there any way to make the auto-stroke/fill checkboxes of the Freehand tool operate, well, automatically?
   -- No, but would be good feature. Would need some changes in the way Shapes & Styles work.

Questions about styles.

1. Can I tell a style with a gradient that I always want that gradient to be at a particular angle
   -- Possible in add-on script.
2. aaaargh why is finding accidental keyframes that change styles such a giant hassle...
   -- Should be improved

[Greenlaw]

aaaargh why is finding accidental keyframes that change styles such a giant hassle, I found a workaround in a seven-year-old forum post here but aaaarrrgh why don't these show up as keyframes in a "style" channel that I can turn on in view>timeline channels and have automatically show up wherever I am in the layer hierarchy when a key's generated, this drove me crazy for like a half an hour today.

Yeah, when working with Custom Styles, that one makes me nuts, too, because it almost always happens unintentionally.

The workaround is to use the Copy/Paste buttons in the Styles window and apply it to a shape in another layer. This makes the keyframes visible on the timeline and easily editable. Usually, I want to copy the 'errant' keyframe to frame 0 and remove it from the animation frame. After making my edit, I copy/paste it back into the Custom Style using the buttons.

Make sure you're using the buttons and not the regular copy/paste commands. Using the buttons fully replaces what's in the Custom Style's 'hidden' timeline instead of adding to it and potentially making the situation worse.

[egypturnash]

[*] Why does edit>select all only work when I'm selecting points, not shapes?
-- Apparently this depends on the current layer type and not the selected tool. Use the [Select All] button on Shapes tool instead.

Hmm, interesting - the Select All button is definitely working for shapes where command-a is not. Do you know which layer types it does work on?

Is there any way to edit the pressure curve of a stroked path after drawing it?
-- You can use the Line Width tool.

Oh, I can indeed, I looked right over that one, oops.

Yeah, when working with Custom Styles, that one makes me nuts, too, because it almost always happens unintentionally.

hahahah okay it's not just me then, I wonder if having a non-rendering layer with a shape in every style in my project will let me catch those quickly. I am definitely going to end up learning every single quirk of Moho's style system if I stick with it, my Illustrator comics-drawing practice is very centered around its Graphic Styles and I can't imagine working without them.

I guess I have a few scripts to write once I've started using Moho enough to be worth the time investment of getting my text editor pointing at wherever Moho keeps its scripts and figuring out enough Lua to kludge something up. Or to install if someone says "this script does what you want but it's called something your Illustrator-shaped brain never would have guessed to search for". Maybe a couple feature requests too.