Delete unused [or used?] colors from the Color Palette?

[MrTemplate]

Hi folks; This is probably so fundamental it's embarrassing but what the heck. I'm working on an object library that, for whatever reason, now has five different shades of red in the color palette. [probably where i created notes that i wanted to easily see, in several different iterations in the past versions of this document.] i'm now trying to polish the final version of this document, and eliminate all of the different reds - there is no longer any red-colored anythings in the document. i tried a resource import, followed by a copy and paste into a fresh document, but no good. the old reds are still sticking in there.

 

Is it possible to somehow get "under the hood" in the color palette manager, and delete colors that are no longer active? or colors that were once created, but now no longer have any reason to exist? i'm just trying to clean up the document and get rid of the unneeded reds.

 

any ideas or tactics gratefully accepted. all the best, Steve

[markdd]

This is an old one and is definitely a feature request. I have been wanting just this feature for years and as a consequence now have a custom color palette with just 12 or so colours which I stick to for almost everything. This keeps things nice and clean.

 

The extra colors that you are seeing are probably buried in the embedded fills, hatches and tiles that you have once used on objects in the attributes palette or class definitions but have not made active. This is a very useful function and is vital for objects that you want to show as say, Hatched on a Top/Plan view but that you want to see as filled when rendered.

 

The consequence of this is that there are hidden colours that are very hard to eliminate.

 

There is a "purge unused colours" function in the Color Palette which I am sure you know about however, Vectorworks sees the hidden colours as used so these are left behind. It would be great to be able to select a colour in the colour palette and delete it in the same way you can for classes. The command would then ask you what you want to substitute it with or make it Black (pen) or White (fill).

 

I posted about this on the forums some years ago and @Pat Stanford very kindly wrote a script for me to make all classes Black with White fill (and nothing else). The script then made all objects "by class". It was a blunt instrument but it worked and I could purge the unused colours from the file and was left with Black and White only.

[MrTemplate]

5 hours ago, markdd said:

This is an old one and is definitely a feature request.

Excellent. thanks for the confirmation that i'm just not missing something basic. cheers, Steve