I’ve somehow turned a folder white, in trying to find a way of using a colour label on it - I’d like my Admin folder in each project to be, say, pink, and the current article I’m working on to be, say, green, to separate them from the older and projected articles’ folders, and the research folders for those articles.
Is there a way to colour the folders? I’ve searched for ‘label’ in the help files, but didn’t find this.
White folders will happen if you turn on label tinting from the view menu. It does this because it has to blend the label colour with the icon, and if it started with blue, it wouldn’t match the documents. So don’t worry about white folders.
You can assign labels to them the same way you do to documents (in fact there isn’t a lot of difference between a folder and a document). There are a number of ways to do this. Right-clicking on the folder; choosing a label from the Inspector (Cmd-Opt-I); viewing the folder on a Corkboard (you might have to select Draft) and right-click the pin if you have those turned on; or Outliner if you have the label column turned on. Incidentally, right-clicking on the icon is the best way to set a bunch of items at once. Select them all in the Binder and right-click on one of them. Whatever you choose will be set to the entire selection.
I tried right-clicking, but while it offers labels for ‘Concept’ and ‘Chapter’, it doesn’t offer colours.
Right-click on a folder. The third option down leads to your label colors.
If you have no colors there, go to File - Label & Status Setup, and make sure you have colors set there.
If you want the folders to be back to their standard blue, go to the View menu, and uncheck the third option from the bottom: “Tint Icons With Label Color”.
Perhaps the default colours for Concept and Chapter are a touch subtle, but they definitely should be there unless you’ve changed them both to white or something. A label is a colour and a phrase. The “Concept” is a part of the label.
Hm. I went to File/ Label & Status Setup and made two new labels - Current (green) and Admin (orange).
Then I ctrl-clicked on my current article in one project and set its label to Current, and ctrl-clicked on the Admin folder where I keep things like word counts, deadlines, agreed prices, stickies for emails requesting interviews or review copies, etc.
They now say they’re labelled, but the Admin folder is still blue-grey, and the (as yet empty) current article is still a white text icon.
Have you turned on label tinting for this project? It sounds as though you haven’t.
View > Tint Icons with Label Color.
Ah, that did it. Wouldn’t you think it should be automatic once you’ve chosen a colour for a label!
Thanks - that’s that solved now; I’ll keep this favourited so I can remember the various steps.
No, you wouldn’t think it would be automatic, as it would be wrong for the program to assume users want the labels to affect icon colours when they are readily available in the inspector.
Glad it helped though.
[slightly off-topic]
Maelduin, all this talk of colour has made me think about your other problem with the empty Binder in another thread (which is now locked). Perhaps the contrast on your display hardware might be out of whack, or set via software to a non-default level, which would change your perception of colours on your screen.
You described the empty Binder as non-stripy, and the icon that you clicked to bring back the contents of the Binder as almost invisible against the blinding white of the Binder. But unless you changed the colour of the Binder in Preferences, the Binder is actually blue, most of the time. If you’ve never changed the colour, is it usually blue for you? All the behaviour you described in your post points to a search that hadn’t been dismissed, and yet you described the Binder as not having stripes, which would appear if a search hadn’t been dismissed.
As an experiment, I started a search in Scrivener that had no results. Everything in the Binder disappeared, but the Binder went from light blue to a white and grey striped state. I then went to Apple menu > System Preferences > Universal Access, and moved the slider under the “Enhance Contrast” one point to the right. The stripy Binder turned to white under that contrast, and the little “X” at the bottom that dismissed my search became almost invisible. When I did disimss the search, the Binder returned to its normal state, but the default blue of the Binder under this contrast was almost completely white.
It’s very easy to accidentally change the contrast settings in Mac OS X – ctrl-opt-cmd-. and ctrl-opt-cmd-, are the universal keyboard shortcuts to do so, and if you have another app with similar shortcuts, it’s almost inevitable.
Just putting this out there as a possibility.
Very interesting! I went into those Universal Access settings and pulled the slider over to the left to the second downward line, and sure enough, the Binder turned blue! Thank you!
Excellent. But unless you have an eye condition that requires increased contrast, the slider should probably all the way to the left. Otherwise, fonts won’t appear very smooth, and visual detail will be reduced. All the way to the left = the default setting.
I tried it all the way to the left, but this makes the Binder go grey, and darkens the screen generally. (I have the Brightness set to its maximum).
By the way, I’m reading the ‘Testimonials’ page now - nice stuff. Wouldn’t it be great if some of those writers thought to make little three-minute movies about facilities they like in Scrivener.
I think you were right about the search; with the Binder now blue, I did a random search, and an X appeared in the place where I saw the faint flower-like image before; clicking on the X cancelled the search.
Are you sure there isn’t something wrong with your display? Is it a CRT or LCD? OS X’s software contrast controls are only meant to compensate for a user’s visual acuity deficits, and actually remove real visual information on the screen to achieve that, uh, contrasty look. It’s definitely nothing like OS X’s brightness control for controlling laptop screens, which acts as a software control for the hardware – the Universal Access contrast control is a special effect, rather than a control as such. I’d try setting the contrast to “Normal” and fiddling with your display’s actual physical settings to get the colours right.
I’m working on a small MacBook with no external display.
Well, the Binder is a greyish blue, but since we’re talking about perception here, it’s unclear as to what’s actually happening. Either your screen is busted, you have an eye condition that makes it hard to differentiate shades of colour (sorry, no offense, but trying to cover all possibilities), or you’ve simply gotten used to the false contrast look, which now might look normal to you (with the normal setting looking too dark). Have you looked at other Mac users’ screens lately, so you can judge whether the the first or last possibilities might be true?
Sorry, another more obvious possibility is that your screen might be mis-calibrated. Go to Apple menu > System Preferences > Displays > Colour. Which colour profile in the resultant list is selected? If Its not Colour LCD (the default for Mac laptops) select that. This profile won’t be perfect, but it’s how your MacBook originally shipped. What does the screen look like after changing profiles?
I’ve selected Colo(ur) LCD, and it looks as if I’m in twilight, but otherwise ok.
As for my sight, I’m extremely shortsighted, but with glasses have perfect vision (far better, the optitian tells me, than people with ‘normal’ uncorrected sight); because I’m short-sighted I have much better colour perception than people with normal sight. Does that help?
Again, because this is a perception issue, and since we’re communicating over the Internet, I have no idea what the issue is here – whether it’s purely your subjective familiarity with however your controls were set, or a possible hardware/software problem. If your eyesight’s fine, things should look okay when the Universal Access contrast control is all the way to the left, the brightness is on maximum, and the default colour profile is selected. You really do need to have a look at what other Mac screens look like to make that judgement.
Meanwhile, one clue would be to see if the actual brightness of an object you are sure is pure white has changed during any of these tweaks. Because you described the Binder as grey, I expected your screen to get brighter after selecting your default colour profile in the Displays preference pane. Given that you seem to have made the screen darker by choosing the default profile, does that mean the Binder doesn’t look blue at all, now? Remember, you need to actually click on the Scrivener project window to see the blue Binder – if that window isn’t the one you’re focusing on, it’ll be a dull grey. This is what happens to lots of Mac windows when they’re not the active window.
And as I said, the default colour profile is by no means perfect – you can click the “Calibrate…” button and follow the instructions to make it more accurate, preferably with the expert settings checkbox ticked. (When you do this, it will ask you to compare and match different colours and shades – when doing this it’s important not to be subjective or choose things according to taste, but to be as objective as possible. Otherwise, graphics that have been designed to display a certain way won’t turn out accurately at all.)
My hunch is that you’ve simply gotten used to an extremely strange bunch of display settings on your computer. That’s it from me – you’re going to have to do a bit of experimenting on your own.