Inkscape palettes

Question

I’ve run into what I can only assume is a bug, but would like some confirmation and ideally a workaround if possible.

I've set up an palette in Inkscape (0.92) and have applied it to my illustration. Now I would like to play with the palette entries to see how the illustration looks as colors change.

If I right-click a palette entry, I see an Edit... option:

If I have no objects selected when I click this, nothing happens. If I do have objects selected, it brings up the Fill and Stroke settings for those objects. That's my first point of confusion, since according to this I would expect it to allow me to edit the palette entry via a color wheel. Instead, I seem to be editing the swatch for the selected object.

If I persist and use the Fill and Stroke settings, things get weirder. If I drag the RGBA sliders around, then everything updates as expected. All objects with the given swatch (not just the object I have selected!) will reflect the chosen color. However, if I modify the color in any other way, it does not:

I've not been able to track down any further information on how editing palette entries is supposed to work in Inkscape. Can anyone point me in the right direction here?

I have a clunky workaround as follows:

1. Bring up the Fill and Stroke for the palette entry.
2. Copy/paste the RGBA value into the text box. This updates all the individual values, but not the palette entry itself.
3. Drag the alpha slider all the way to the right (assuming full opacity in the color, which is the case for all my colors). This applies the palette entry correctly.

Answer 1

Another workaround:

• select one of your shapes that have the fill color you want to edit
• select all objects with the same fill color (Edit > Select same > Fill color)
• adjust the fill color of the selected objects (=type new color values or turn the wheel or push sliders) Do it in the Flat color tab, not in the Swatches.
• if you got something useless, give to all the old swatch (it's still in the swatches panel) or continue editing
• if you like the result so much that the new color earns to be a swatch, click swatch icon in the Fill and Stroke panel
• deselect all (=press Esc) and delete the old swatch from the swatches panel if you consider it harmful

Answer 2

I can confirm the bug/behaviour in the most recent stable version of 0.92.2 from the Inkscape website, as of today 11/03/2018. There also seems to be a related but different bug report here which affected previous versions. In that bug, it was the other way round, entering the values worked, but moving the sliders didn't. Apparently a fix was done, but the one you've discovered is the other way round. The sliders work but changing the values doesn't update the swatch.

Perhaps you should file a bug report?

As for how it should work, I would imagine that entering the values should work the same as moving the sliders.

Anyhoo, your clunky workaround is the only thing that works for me.