Requirement

All Fireworks versions

Article

1. General

Paste Inside is a relatively complex operation with links with masks and groups. And this complexity leads sometimes to odd results when it is combined with live filters.

2. Live filters and Paste Inside 1

Take a bimap (here the texture) and apply live filters. Cut the texture which is now in your clipboard, select the danger sign and Paste Inside. The danger sign has been turned into a mask with "show fill and stroke" and the clipboard contents (the texture) become the maskee.

Summary

Description	Actions
Selected object (danger sign)	has no filters
Object in clipboard (texture)	has filters

Paste Inside result: Fireworks groups the clipboard object and masks it with the selected object. Now you have to ungroup twice to see the live filters. Ungrouping the mask once will lead to a group of 1 object. So we need to ungroup a second time to get the filters back.

3. Live filters and Paste Inside 2

In the second case, apply live filters to a vector object (here the danger sign) then you cut the bitmap texture and Paste Inside. In this case, the filters are lost after ungrouping. This is because the object (the danger sign) becomes a mask and masks cannot have filters.

Summary

Description	Actions
Selected object (danger sign)	has filters
Object in clipboard (texture)	has no filters

What is odd nonetheless is that the live filters have been transferred to the texture! In fact, that is how it works. So basically, since masks are not allowed to have live filters, when you paste inside and the selected object becomes a mask, it transfers any filters it has to the clipboard objects because it will be a maskee and is allowed to have filters, so you maintain the appearance of the filters even though they change hosts.

Conclusion

The solution would be an enhancement to allow masks to have filters.

Credits

Credits to Aaron Beall for his unvaluable knowledge.