Inline annotations have become chameleons

Scrivener Scrivener for macOS
1

I’m noticing in Scrivener 2.0/Mac that inline annotations have trouble keeping their color straight. Clicking in and out of them, or clicking and holding for ~ 1 second, will often
cause the text to adopt whatever highlight color is selected in the formatting bar.

2

Please post the steps to reproduce.
Thanks,
Keith

3
  1. Create new blank project
  2. Create a folder in the Draft
  3. Create 3 blank document children inside the folder with the following content types:
    Document 1: normal text
    Document 2: inline annotation
  4. Enter “Edit Scrivenings” mode by selecting “Draft” in the binder.
  5. Click between documents 1 and 2 in the editor until the inline annotation adopts the color selected in the highlight item on the format menu.

It only happens in “Edit Scrivenings” mode (or whatever it’s called in 2.0).

4

To clarify, on step #5, when you say “click between documents 1 and 2” where are you clicking? On the divider line repeatedly? Or are you clicking between regular (black) text and to within the annotation (red text) and back and forth again? Is there any content at all in document two beyond the annotation?

I can’t get this to reproduce. I tried the directions straight, and then tried changing my text colour and highlight colour controls in the format rule. Obviously, if I change the text colour control while the cursor is in the annotation, it changes—that is an intentional feature—but if I change the colour (to green) while in document 1 and then click back to the second document, the annotation does not change colour.

5

Funny, I can’t get this to reproduce now either. Chalk it up to a fluke, I suppose.

6

I’ve been getting a similar problem–it has to do with the text color, not the highlight color, but see if you can get this:

  1. Type in a document using colored text.
  2. Type an inline annotation. Should be red or whatever the default is.
  3. Go to the beginning of the annotation and backspace so that the annotation bumps into the text ahead of it. (If your annotation started out touching, backspace into the word before it.)

Consistently when I do this, the annotation suddenly takes on the color of the text it touches.

Additionally, if I’m typing in colored text, switch to annotation, and then switch back, the text reverts to no color (black). I feel like that’s a bug, but maybe it’s the intended behavior. If it is a bug, it may be related?

7

Thanks, I can reproduce this. The problem comes down to Apple’s colour panel and the way the standard text view is set up. Apple have hardwired the text view so that the colour panel always changes the font colour - no matter what. And every time you click in a coloured piece of text, the panel gets a message to update the colour in the panel, which then gets bounced back to the text again. That’s not a problem when the text is the same colour as in the panel anyway, but in Scrivener I have to do a lot of background rewiring just to get the colour panel to affect highlights or annotation colours instead of font colour. No matter what I do, sometimes stray messages end up coming back to the text, though. It’s very annoying.

So, I’ve added this to the list to look into.

Regarding text reverting to black, this is intended, yes, mainly to work around the above problems. The trouble is that half of the time the underlying text ends up getting changed by a change to the annotation colour, so under the temporary annotation colour, the text can be all sorts of colours. To work around this, when you convert back to regular text, all the colour gets removed.

8

I’m suddenly having this problem, where I enter inline annotations they are black instead of red.

I’ve not seen this before in using Scrivener for a while. I wonder what I did?

I think I’m seeing it in several documents that I split from an original one. Maybe it’s something in this set of split documents?

I read that I can click in the annotation and then use the text color field to change it back, but I was hoping I could set a default annotation color that would stick.

I don’t suppose there’s a way to highlight all the split-up documents and change the annotation color for all of them?

9

That’s the way it should work. The last colour you specifically change an annotation to will stick and be the colour new annotations are (in that project) until you change it again. So perhaps at some point you inadvertently changed one to black. Are you saying you’ve changed one to red, and then made a new one and it was still black?