Keith, I know there was a thread on this, but I can’t find it and search thinks “annotation” and “colour” are too common to search for.
Some time ago, someone posted a thread saying that his annotations had suddenly turned grey instead of red, a problem which I thought I had encountered. It’s just happened again, but this time I know the precise circumstances.
I compiled a draft which included a number of annotations, with export to RTF comments turned off as I don’t know if the recipient would be savvy enough to have them turned on on her machine. The RTF file opened beautifully in NWP with the annotations within the text in square brackets and coloured red as expected. However as I checked it through, I saw that I had left a couple of minor errors in the file so I corrected them in NWP.
I then copied and pasted that version back over the Scrivener text so that the version in Scrivener would reflect the version I had finally sent. The annotations appeared in red as annotations in Scrivener, but with the square brackets from the exported version as well as the bubble. I deleted one of the square brackets and the annotation immediately turned grey. Any editing to any of the annotations immediately turned them grey. Removing the annotation status and re-applying it didn’t affect the colour … the only way to turn them red again was to use the colour palette.
I thought you might like to know.
Cheers
Mark
From memory the last one was resolved as the person using footnotes rather than annotations (footnotes are gray).
Obviously not what you started with here - but could the export/import process have somehow converted them?
I suspect annotations may lose their annotation-ness when exported to RTF and reimported, although I haven’t tried it.
Matt
Thanks Matt, actually, I know I have experienced the annotations going grey before.
Bit more investigation … I missed a stage. Copying and pasting the text from NWP into Scriv. retains all the colour-coding. I then do a Convert : Text to Default Format or whatever it is, and all the colour-coding is lost. The square brackets for the annotations remain, though they are no longer annotations. Highlight them, and do a Cmd-Ctrl-A (I don’t know if that’s my key-binding or if it’s standard for Annotation) and they get the bubble but remain grey and will stay that way unless you highlight them again and use the colour palette.
Just done one further trial, if annotations are exported as RTF comments, rather than in-line, and then re-imported, they are imported as annotations and survive the converting to default text format, so in future I’ll use that and tell people to make sure they can view comments … Mind you sometimes there are so many, that would be impractical, as the comment column on a single page would be several pages in length!
It’s no great issue. I just thought Keith might be interested to know.
Mark
Hi,
Well, I’m not sure why the colour is changing in this situation, but I can say that this has nothing to do with annotations, as what you imported back in didn’t have any annotations in it. The only way for footnotes or annotations to survive a round trip is to export them as RTF footnotes/annotations. So, when you turned off RTF annotations and exported the file, the annotation information was destroyed, as the RTF format only knows about RTF comments, not about Scrivener annotations. Scrivener just colours the RTF text whatever colour the annotation is and places square brackets around it, to indicate that that range of text is a comment/annotation or whatever in the export document. But that’s all it is - just some red text with square brackets around it. When you re-import such a file, it gets imported as-is. Annotations have bubbles around them in Scrivener, not square brackets (and it would be wrong of Scrivener to assume that anything imported with square brackets is an annotation).
When you converted the text to default, naturally it lost its colour - only Scrivener annotations can survive that.
So, whilst I don’t understand why the text changed colour of its own accord, I can say that this isn’t an annotation bug…
All the best,
Keith
Thanks for responding Keith.
I realise that, when re-imported from in-line, they are no longer annotations, but I finally narrowed it down to the fact that, after re-importing and setting them as default text, even if I try to turn them back into annotations in Scrivener again, they don’t take on annotation colour. I’ll test further to see if, when they are there but now have a grey bubble, they will compile as comments or whether they are merely getting the bubble but just remaining as ordinary in-line text.
I’ll do more testing.
Yours
Mark
Mark,
Just a thought, again likely to be off track - could it have something to do with the square brackets?
If you delete them before turning them into an annotation, is it still grey, or is it red?
What about if you just type the square brackets in a normal document and then make it an annotation?
Matt
Hi Matt and Keith,
On further investigation it seems even more random. I attach a small project trial.scriv.zip. This project is in fact one which I set up to try various things. It now contains a single text, which has been copied and pasted in from another Scrivener project. The original text in the project I copied it from was a .doc which I imported.
In the original, annotations come up normally in red. However when I try to add an annotation to this one — and no, I’m not mistakenly adding footnotes! — they come up grey, as you will see from the two random annotations I have put in there. Any others I try to put in come up grey. You might like to try it for yourself.
Just to complicate matters, I created a new project, pasted in this same text, added an annotation — normal — exported it for the annotation to go inline; I then re-imported that, the former annotation was in brackets and red. I did a convert to default text formatting and it turned black as expected.
I then highlighted the stretch including the brackets and pressed Cmd-Shift-A … it turned into an annotation in red! And when I added another annotation, it too was normal. When I deleted the brackets within what was now an annotation, it remained a red annotation.
I can only assume that under some more esoteric circumstance a project can develop a gremlin of some sort; but whatever is happening, grey annotations are alive and kicking randomly on my MBP.
Of course you will now tell me that when you open the zipped project it all comes up hunky-dory for you in full blushing pulchritude!
Mark
trial.scriv.zip (21.1 KB)
I can confirm you are not insane.
I will leave the rest to Keith 
<Phew!> I was beginning to wonder …
Thanks …
Mark
Hi Mark,
I can’t see anything with the project you have posted. True, the annotations are black, but there is nothing wrong with that per se. If you place the insertion point inside the annotation and hit shift-cmd-C to bring up the colour panel, the annotation will change to any colour you wish. Annotations don’t have to be red, after all; the colour panel changes the colour of the annotation. The next annotation will then be created in the last annotation colour used. My guess would be that at some point you accidentally used the colour panel and selected black or some such whilst the selection was within an annotation. After that, any annotations you created would be in black until you changed the annotation colour again.
All the best,
Keith
Hi Keith,
As you say, it’s nothing too serious, just visibility, should one have footnotes and annotations in the same document. And it’s easy to change, as you say.
I’ll keep an eye on it, because the only time I remember ever using the colour panel in Scrivener was when I set the label colours in the project from which that paragraph was copied. But the annotations in the original project still come up in the standard red.
Oh well, maybe it all happened on a Friday 13th with a full moon and the wind in the north-east …
Mark
I noticed the same problem, but without exporting and importing text to Nisus or any other app. All of a sudden new comments appeared in black instead of red. I could also easily change them back to red, but prior to the latest beta (which is what I am using), I never had to change the color of the annotations manually, not matter what amount of editing I did (and therefore might have accidentally changed the annotations color to black).
I would love to look into this further, but I’m afraid that there is not enough here to go on. The annotation in the project posted has its colour set to black. The only code in Scrivener that can possibly change the annotation colour is related to the colour panel. If no annotation colour is found set in the project, it defaults to red, not black or grey. I’m not saying there’s not an obscure bug here, but there’s nothing I can do right now until someone is able to provide step-by-step instructions to reproduce.
Best,
Keith
I’m also experiencing sporadic “problems” with the annotation colour. I’ve posted about it before but after that it all seemed fine.
Now since this thread started I thought I’d see if anything strange happened with my stuff. And sure enough:
I brought up a document with some annotations, all red, and tried some editing (that is I wrote some stuff in the annotation). No problem. Everything seemed fine. Then I brought up the “Show Colors” (Shift+Cmd+C) and without choosing any colour in the palette (snow, white, that is, showed up in crayons) I ran the cursor up and down over the lines. As soon as I reached the first annotation it turned blue(?!) and continuing scrolling down to the others they all turned blue as well. The colour palette mirrored the colourchange. If I turn the annotation back to red it doesn’t stay red when I once again put the cursor there. But now it doesn’t matter if the colour-palette is visible or not.
It feels like there’s an annotation-colour-preference stored here somewhere, with the colour blue in my case, but I can’t seem to find it.
It’s no big deal in my case, but I thought this little input could be some help in finding the gremlins. If indeed there is any - it could all be some user-error.
Magnus
Like I say, if someone can provide steps to reproduce, I’ll look into and report back then. Provide steps here and I’ll reply if it helps find it.
Thanks!
Keith
Hi Keith,
Here’s the scrivfile with the strange annotationcolour behavior. I saved it, tried open it and everytime I put the cursor inside the red annotation it turns blue.
Something to do with preferences perhaps?
Is it ok on your end?
Magnus
AnnotationTest [2008-04-23 22.41].zip (24.4 KB)
A-ha. That helps. I think I know what’s going on. The strange thing about your annotations in that sample project was that, if you strip the annotations, they have an underlying text colour. To see that, just select all the text, then hit shift-cmd-A twice, so that everything is turned into an annotation and then everything is turned into not an annotation. You will see that the first two annotations are, underneath, text with a blue foreground. The last is text with a red foreground. (Perhaps you coloured the text, or imported it as coloured text, and later applied the annotation attribute?)
A curiosity of the text system is that if you click into any text with a foreground colour, it sends a message to the colour panel (regardless of whether it is open or not) to change its colour to match the foreground colour. (If the text doesn’t have any foreground colour it will appear black and won’t affect the colour panel - though black text can have the black foreground colour sometimes.) So, in this case, this is what is happening: when you click in one of those annotations, the underlying text (beneath the annotation - the annotation colour is a temporary colour that overrides the real colour), because it has a colour, it sends that colour to the colour panel. The colour panel then sends a message that its colour has changed back to the text, which changes the colour of the annotation!
A simple workaround would for me to change it so that applying the annotation strips any existing foreground colour. That should sort things out.
Thanks!
All the best,
Keith
No, thank YOU!
Incredibly service as usual. Maybe Mark can benefit from this as well.
Take care,
Magnus
I think this is almost certainly Mark’s problem, too, looking at it, although I can’t see evidence of it in the project he posted. He said that the documents that were affected were originally imported from Word. In programs that use the OS X text system, black text usually has no foreground colour assigned; I have seen documents imported from Word, though, that have the black text foreground colour assigned to it. If you applied an annotation colour to such text and then later clicked back into it, the annotation colour would be changed to black, for the reasons given above.
I have fixed this for the next update - annotations now strip any foreground colour so that this oddness should be avoided in future.
Thanks for all the help tracking it down!
Best,
Keith
Keith, what can I say … and Mange and all the others who’ve joined in. As I’ve said, it was a minor irritation, but it’s great that Keith has been able to track it down and do something about it for us all, and I hope, at a cost of not too much time and effort.
Thank you so much. 
Mark