Solarized is a popular theme, but does it really work for Scrivener? What with default text in light mode being hard-coded black, and Scrivenerās emphasis on background accenting (labels, style markup), I couldnāt achieve low-contrast main text yet have colourful, easily distinguished, readable background accents with the out-of-the-box Solarized theme.
Hereās my take on an āinside-outā Solarized theme for Scrivener. I use the medium grays, usually used for text, as my backgrounds. Dark mode text is the familiar cream of the Solarized light background; light mode text is of course Scrivenerās default black. The result is that Iām very close to the contrast Solarized is intended to present both in light and in dark modes. As a bonus, using the Solarized background colours as label and style backgrounds results in clear, readable text in both modes as well.
Iām including a Solarized palette (Solarized.clr) for the Apple colour picker. (When in the Colour picker, click on the gear icon and choose Importā¦) Not only does the palette have the usual Solarized 16-colour palette, Iāve included dark and light versions of the 8 accent colours as well.
Usage suggestions:
For backgrounds behind text, use the regular Solarized accent colours (Yellow, Red, etc.) to get proper contrast. This includes label colours used as backgrounds, backgrounds for styles, and backgrounds for comments.
For use in links, use the dark colour (Red01, etc.) for the Light theme, and the light colour (Red1, etc.) for the Dark theme.
For use in inline annotations, use either the dark (Red01) or light (Red1) colour variations, according to what works best for you, but using the base colour (Red) will remove almost all contrast with the background, and make your annotations hard to read.
I really like this theme! But, clicking on the link goes to a broken Dropbox link (file not available). Is this theme not available anymore? I canāt find it on google either. Thanks.
Thank you my friend! But, I tried opening your Ayu.stheme file, but WinRAR fails to open it and says itās an unknown format. Iām on a Windows 10 PC. I know this theme is for the Mac version of Scrivener 3, but what I want to do is copy some of the color settings from your theme to my own theme files for Scrivener 3 for Windows RC version. How do I open the .stheme zip file on a Windows 10 PC? Any help would be much appreciated. Thanks.
EDIT: I tried just opening the Ayu.stheme file directly in Notepad++, but I got a bunch of random characters for the data elements in the XML structure within the file, like the following. What does that mean? This is what Iām seeing: