How do you change the automatically generated table of contents (TOC) hyperlink color in Scrivener 3 For Windows? I would like it to be the normal hyperlink color which has a hex value of #0000EE. I am able to force all of my back matter links to have this “normal unclicked internet hyperlink color.” This was something I wasn’t able to do with Scrivener 1 For Windows. All of the links turned out to be black with Scrivener 1 and sometimes wouldn’t even reach the correct destination path.
I also noticed that the color for the TOC links in my books created in Scrivener 3 (compiled in ePUB 3 format) for Amazon KDP vary depending on the device being used. On my iPhone, they actually appear normal, but on my iPad Pro they are bright green and on my desktop PC they are orange. I have look at some other books created with software other than Scrivener 3 For Windows and they all have #0000EE as the hyperlink color.
Please let me know if you need any additional information and what action steps I need to take next to resolve this issue. Thanks.
I am curious where you are getting the information about the colour setting from, as by defalut there would be no forced application of colour to hyperlinks anywhere, and it would be very unusual to see forced colour in one specific section like the ToC. Here for example is what I get, when examining a hyperlink in the contents.xhtml file in Sigil:
Here we see that the styles that have an impact are coming from Sigil’s dark mode theme. If Scrivener were doing anything to this element, then we would see a reference to the stylesheet.css file.
Are you post-processing the ebook using a converter or some other formatting tool? In that case, it would be worthwhile to examine what Scrivener actually produces first, so as to determine whether or not you are wasting your time trying to resolve the problem in the wrong program.
Of course if you are creating your own compile Format or using one you downloaded from somewhere, it can do almost anything with regards to formatting, using the format’s CSS settings, but ordinarily you would not want to force the issue on text colours, as that should in all but rare cases be left up to the theme settings of the ebook reader itself. Bright blue is not going to look good on every background, nevermind be legible.
Given your description though, it kind of sounds like that’s already what is happening, since you describe it looking different in various ebook readers. That’s how it should be.
I have fl.ux and any other screen color manipulation settings off when doing the color check on all devices. I’m not sure what Sigil is though. I did a Google search and came up with that #0000EE hyperlink color. I am simply copying and pasting my document from Microsoft Word, with the exception of the back matter which was created manually in Scrivener 1 For Windows and is now in Scrivener 3 For Windows. I simply compile as ePUB 3.0 in Scrivener 3 For Windows and upload it to Amazon KDP, and I get the random color issues in the TOC only now. As stated earlier, with Scrivener 1 For Windows, sometimes links would be broken and the colors would be off in the back matter as well. So really, everything is fixed, with the exception of the random colors in the TOC. So there’s no way to specify the colors of the TOC directly in Scrivener 3 For Windows?
Here is a link to Sigil, which is an ebook editor. Another alternative is Calibre, which has fewer features, but is nice if you already use that tool for conversion and ebook management and don’t want to install anything further.
I simply compile as ePUB 3.0 in Scrivener 3 For Windows and upload it to Amazon KDP, and I get the random color issues in the TOC only now.
Yeah, that’s worth looking into why that is happening, but what you should be seeing is no text colour in the contents.xhtml file, nor the stylesheet.css file. It may be that when you pasted from Word some bad formatting came in, you should select the text of that file, right click on the selection, and use the Text Color ▸ Remove Color command.
So there’s no way to specify the colors of the TOC directly in Scrivener 3 For Windows?
You can change almost everything about an ebook. The whole thing is just HTML and CSS, which Scrivener provides extensive support for modification, and you can do an awful lot with just that. Here is a post that I’ve written on the matter.
But to reiterate, you really don’t want to be forcing hyperlink colours. Traditional bright blue looks terrible in dark mode readers—and for that same reason you don’t want black either.