Changing the color of text to which a comment refers

Hello! When I add a comment to text, the text which I highlighted prior to inserting the comment changes color and becomes boxed. The box is great, but I don’t want it to change color. Anyone knows how to prevent the color change?

Right-click the commented word/phrase, select Highlight Color and change it to what you want.

Firstly, your original text – the one you applied the comment to – will not be colored and boxed when printing. All that color and boxing only appears in the editor and is thought as a reminder. It also helps to identify the place a comment belongs to.

Right-clicking the commented word/phrase and then setting a Text Color or Highlight Color does not seem to be such a good idea. This will in fact really change the appearance of your text phrase on printing (which you can easily check with Print Preview). And in fact, Text Color will apply to your text, but that won’t be visible in the Editor as long as you have the comment active.

Just to clarify: Is it the appearance in the Editor for which you want the color marking to disappear or the appearance in the final product.

It is the appearance in the Editor for which I want the color marking of the commented text to disappear. The reason is that I have a lot of comments and there’s too much color variety of the text which makes it all look sort of like confetti – a bit irritating, you know.

Ah, I understand. Unfortunately, Scrivener does not have an option to configure the text and background colors for comments, footnotes or inline annotations. You might want to bring that to the attention of L&L as a feature request. Or you might just want to read your document after compiling it to PDF.

From the Windows Scrivener Manual, p. 280:

Setting Colours for Linked Comments

Linked comments, as with inline annotations, can be assigned a colour. By default, when you use one of the previously mentioned techniques for adding a note, the highlighter anchor box in your text will be yellow, as will the corresponding note in the inspector. These two colours will always match, making it easier to see where you are in your text in relation with your notes.

To change the colour of a note, right-click on it in the inspector sidebar, or in the shaded header bar area when using Popup Notes (subsection 18.3.6). Six default colours have been provided for convenience, but you can also opt to use the colour palette to change the colour to a custom selection (from the inspector only), with the “Show Colors” contextual menu command.

The last colour you chose will be automatically used the next new note that you create. This is remembered across all projects, and will be persistent until you choose a new colour.

So, to change the colour for an existing comment to your editor background colour,

  1. right-click on the comment in the sidebar (so that the entire comment is selected)
  2. use the “Show Colours” context menu item, and choose your editor background colour.

All future comments will have your editor background colour. You can change existing comments as you go along—click once on a comment in the Inspector to select it, use ctrl-a to select all visible comments in the Inspector, then follow the process above to change the comments to your editor background colour all at once.

Yes, a bit of a piecemeal approach, but it will get the job done… hope this helps!

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P.S. A similar process works for inline annotations, if you want to change their default colour. See manual p. 378.

The View ▸ Text Editing ▸ Hide Markup command can be used to hide all comment highlighting in the main editor. You can toggle that on and off as you wish, and configure what gets hidden in the Appearance: Textual Marks options tab.

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Thanks for that! I’d forgotten it because I use it so seldom. Unlike the OP, I like having confetti all over my documents. :wink:

Same here! But the markup hiding can be quite nice if you want to mentally switch over to proofing mode for a bit. Personally I would find it difficult to edit with that mode on all of the time, as not being able to see what kind of special formatting is applied to the text would make it easy to “spread” formatting around in an unwanted fashion, or to accidentally delete a comment by over-typing an entire phrase, etc.

Seems like your instructions refer to comment background color. I am trying to change the color of the text of the main document to which the comment is linked.

That could work for some, but in my case it turns off the comment color completely – I on the other hand am trying to change the color of the commented text to a more subtle color. Sorry if I didn’t make it clear.

Sorry I didn’t understand your question! I don’t know of any way to do what you want, other than to change the link colour for all links. If that would suit, the textual marks appearance options would let you do that. Sorry I can’t be of more help.

SOLVED. Thank you, that’s perfect. So to sum it up, if one wants to change to color of the text to which a comment is linked, you go to Options, Appearance, Textual Marks, Colors, Links – and choose whatever color you want. Thank you again!