Exporting and build settings

There’s two main ways to get values out of Pinwheel. You can select lots of colours and copy them, or you can use the build sheet for automated exporting. Pinwheel’s build system can be used to configure what gets exported, and how. The key points are:

• Each colour, colour set, colour alias, or group can be assigned to a build group.
• Each build group can have build tasks.
• Each task does one thing (export SCSS etc).

Why set it up this way? It means all the settings are in a central place. If you want to change the export options, you just need to edit one build task. If you want to add a new export type, you just need to add a build task.

Pinwheel’s automated exporting is set up in the build sheet, which can be opened via Files › Build Settings. Once set up, choosing File › Build All will export everything.

Name processing #

Exporting can process color, color set, color alias, and group names. That means you can use nicely capitalized names within your Pinwheel documents, and they can also appear how you’d like within the exported code. “My Color” can become “my-color” or “myColor”, based on your export settings.

Command line #

Pinwheel also has command line support, so building can be scripted. That means once the Pinwheel document is set up, you may never need to actually export via Pinwheel’s UI — it can all be scripted, if that’s what you prefer.