The behavior of the text color button seems to be unreliable. Usually it will change the color of the button to match the color of the text at the end of your selection. In other words, if you start your selection in black text and finish it in red text, the button will be red.
This is weird and not how text color buttons work in any other app I’ve ever used, but maybe, possibly convenient? The real problem is that it doesn’t always behave this way. Sometimes it will just change to a random color after your selection. Sometimes when you push the button, the text color you get is not the text color you had selected. It’s a real pain.
This is important to me because of how I edit. I don’t know how other people edit, but I change all my text to red. Then I will read through and look for problems. Once I have a section of text validated, I change it to black. If I come across something I don’t know how to resolve right away (like I can’t figure out how to deal with a plot point, or I can’t seem to manage the right phrasing for a sentence) then I just leave that problem area red and move on to the next part. If I get called away for a few days, I can come back and the red problem areas stand out like sore thumbs. Once the whole text is black, I know I’ve completed that revision and can send it out for test reading.
I’ve also been using the highlight button to indicate areas with special problems that will require something extra to solve. Highlight behaves like a standard word processor highlight button rather than matching the behavior of the text color button, but it’s also erratic and prone to malfunction.
It is also a little frustrating that I can’t tell visually if the text has changed color or been highlighted while it’s selected. Most word processors give you a color change indication but Scrivener just shows all selected text as white.
Basically how it works is that if you click inside coloured text, it will automatically pick up that colour for you. Once it has a colour set, you can select any text and just click the button (not the arrow) to apply that colour. So it’s useful for what you are describing where you want to go through and “red pen” some text. You can just highlight the text, click it, and move on. Normal typing does not use the colour that is shown unless you click the button once to set colour typing on. Then it works like normal formatting (such as bold): you keep typing in that colour so long as you continue typing from within a coloured range. Again, just like bold or italics, nothing mysterious there.
We will eventually add a mode where you can deliberately set the cursor to always type in a certain colour, which is very handy for revisions. I use that a lot myself, but for now it is select-and-click, or click-and-type.
I’m not sure what you mean by “if you click inside coloured text”. If you did click anywhere, it would deselect everything. How Scrivener works for me (on two different computers) is exactly as I described it. If I click drag, the text color button shows the color where my selection ends.
I can tell it is malfunctioning at times because the text color button will sometimes show red, but when I click it, the selected text turns black (or vice versa).
Well I agree with you that it probably should not work this way, and in fact I’m not quite sure why it does. The Mac does not work this way either. The colour is set intentionally, and no matter what you do with the cursor or what you select, it remains that colour until you change it. So I’ll see if we have anything on the list for this.
That is, if you have coloured text in the editor and place the insertion point within that text, the format bar icon will pick up that colour. If you click into uncoloured text, the button will remain the same colour–it won’t change until you click into text of a different colour or you elect to change the colour by choosing something different from the drop-down menu (or via the menu or such). If your selection contains text of different colours, the button will use the colour from the end of the selection. If you’re getting it switching to black, it sounds like your text is specifically coloured black rather than being uncoloured and displaying in the default. You can select the text and use the “Remove Color” option from the text colour menu to change that.
I’m not sure what you mean here, but maybe it was just a different understanding of “click”? Ioa meant just clicking into the editor, not clicking the button to set the colour.
If the selection begins within the colored text and extends into uncoloured text, clicking the button will colour all the text with the colour shown on the button. (Clicking again will remove it.) If the selection begins in uncoloured text and extends into coloured text, clicking the button will remove the colour; clicking it a second time will apply the colour. This is different from Word, where the button doesn’t function as a toggle.
Yes, I understand how it is supposed to work. That is not what is happening. The highlighted text sometimes does not become red when I click on the red text color button. I don’t know how I can be any more clear about this. This is the bug hunt forum. I am reporting a bug. Please stop stop telling me how it is supposed to work and listen when I tell you it is not working that way.
Understand that finding a bug is often much more than a matter of declaring that one exists. In order to find its limits we have to know what you are doing to trigger it, and making sure that established and designed usage is not a part of those limits is an important part of the process. We need precise steps that can reproduce the bug, preferably from a new blank project so that external circumstances are eliminated, but if a blank project cannot reproduce it, that may mean something in particular with the project configuration is involved, changing the focus of the investigation. This is why we ask questions and probe into what it is your are doing. Because when you get down to it: the problem is, we see nothing out of line here. When we test this feature for ourselves in test projects it works as intended. There is no need to get rude about it.