Hi, I’m a big fan of modifying UI, and I love that I can change colors and fonts in Scrivener. However I always find it very hard to figure out what the settings are actually changing.
Either I’m just missing it, or it’s missing from the settings. I’m not sure if or how many of the colors aren’t in there are but there seem to be some. For example I got very confused by the Binder Background Color because it didn’t change when the change is ‘applied’, only when the preferences tab is closes, and sometimes only when restarting. Not to mention it doesn’t cover the full background, which is a separate issue.
This could also be an issue of terminology. I have no way of determining what the various labels mean? I don’t know what ‘Scrivenings Titles Background’ is, and there’s no description info. Some things just aren’t very clear and if it’s not being used somewhere on the screen it, you might just not know what you’re changing at all.
As far as solutions to this, there are a lot of ways to approach this. If this was HTML one could inspect and find that info. The Specified UI could be open/highlighted, so we can see it change. Dynamic examples could be included in the color editor screen so we could get an idea where we need to look. Probably the simplest would be to add descriptive text and the visual location of the specific elements it will change. That said if some elements are not editable, that’s probably the biggest issue, since I can’t tell which ones aren’t listed, I will end up changing everything just trying to figure it out, ultimately fruitlessly.
There’s also the Progress Bar colors (In mine I have Start as red, End as green, the Midway as yellow, and the Overflow as cyan, and looking at it, I think it’s just wrong? For whatever reason the overflow color is used somewhere between Midway and Start. Midway is used only briefly, and then once it reaches End, it starts adding an extra bit of Midway color instead of the Overflow color. Or else I’m very confused about what these things mean.
That’s just my thoughts on improvements for color/text UI customization. Do with as you will.
I’d advise a book a Scrivener Themes, because that’s the way to modify the UI. If you want readymade Themes, go to the Windows Themes post.
For terminology, the Scrivener Manual in the Help menu is the place to go, The general workings of Scrivener is best explained in the Interactive Tutorial, also from the Help menu.
With Themes you won’t get HTML, but you will be able to change a QSS stylesheet, similar to CSS Stylesheets.
As for the colour settings in Appearance, you should find them documented in Appendix B.5. Both appendices A and B are handy tools for learning the interface, and they are organised in the same order as the user interface to make it easy to find things in both directions.
There’s also the Progress Bar colors (In mine I have Start as red, End as green, the Midway as yellow, and the Overflow as cyan, and looking at it, I think it’s just wrong? For whatever reason the overflow color is used somewhere between Midway and Start. Midway is used only briefly, and then once it reaches End, it starts adding an extra bit of Midway color instead of the Overflow color. Or else I’m very confused about what these things mean.
With a few simple tests I don’t see what you describe happening, with progress bar colours. For me the Start colour is used up until 49% and then it switches to the Midway colour, and that is used until the goal is hit and it switches to End colour. If I enable the overflow option and keep testing, I see the correct colour used for that as a “second” progress bar building up over the End colour.
Perhaps you have the smooth transition option set? That may well produce some confusion if the base colours you choose end up mixing together to create other colours you selected, given how RGB blending works.
What you are showing looks more like the threshold, the “overrun allowance” you can give yourself so it doesn’t immediately go into overrun. If you try setting that to ‘zero’ is the result clearer? If so, then you know what to look for anyway, as that means you’re over but still within a reasonable amount of being over.
Last I checked, overrun doesn’t show at all in the Outliner though. Check against the footer bar in the editor itself for a reference of that.
You’re right, I am seeing the overrun color in the footer bar. I was under the impression they were supposed to give the same information.
I also figured out why the overrun color is showing up earlier and inconsistently. I think it means the page has a minimum target and the current value is below that. I didn’t realize that was a thing. I guess it’s also an underrun?
Yeah, here is a thread on overrun not showing up. It was put forward for improvement, but nothing ever came of it. So at the moment it is working as intended, although I will admit I do not understand why it depicts overrun allowance or the minimum target, but not overrun (which to me seems maybe more important than either of those?). It would be more logical for the outliner to either be a very simple progress bar (like these), or the same exact progress bar as in the editor footer.
