Hi Jane
I suspected as much. While I get that by design that is the easiest dev way to bring in SVG as custom shapes - it would be great if for simple shapes such as Rectangles, that there is a way to map attributes to control points and make a “smart” Axure shape like a rectangle with editable attributes like corner radius (much like photoshop’s live shapes vs regular shapes).
Obviously converting random complex shapes might be cumbersome, but since we are often dealing with textbox-style shapes, keeping the editability of shapes when you can - so you can tweak properties in Axure - would be ideal where possible.
This also begs the bigger question of how to map groups to Axure elements besides Axure custom shapes, since Axure has more “smarts” in its elements than Sketch (or SVG) does. So some thought is required in the design for this.
I gave it some thought, and wondered if the default way to bring shapes in, should be the way it currently works - bringing them in as several custom shapes. But perhaps, if you give a Sketch Layer or GROUP a specific name, then the Paste could be smart enough to translate that specially named group of items into 1 kind of Axure element.
For example, let’s say you have a Sketch group consisting of a rounded rectangle with a text field placed inside it - if the group were named, “AxureTextbox - something” then when you pull in that group, those 2 Sketch shapes could be combined to an Axure rectangle named “something” containing that text with the corner radius properties set appropriately. Or if it was named “AxureInputbox - something” then Axure would attempt to combine both 2 layers into an input box and try to style it (where it could).
Does that make sense? This would make it a conscious decision to pull in items and have them map to appropriate Axure elements. Naming Sketch items in the form of:
“Axure<elementtype> - <youritemname>”
would make it so it would be incredibly unlikely to do this unless you intended to. But if you did not name it special like this then it would continue to work as you’ve already implemented it - as custom shapes in Axure.
Please float that by your dev team and see what they think…
thanks!