Way of making dark mode text highlights more readable

Scrivener Scrivener for Windows
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1

As a follow up to this topic, could somebody please give an advice?

The issue is that if you’re using the Highlighter tool (not text selection!) with dark themes, you are limited to obnoxious bright basic colours like solid Red, Blue etc. and can’t use pastel default Highlighter colours since they render light text of a dark theme almost invisible. Can this (colour of text under Highlighter) be changed in theme colour prefs? If yes, then where and how the setting is called?

Below is the illustration of what I have in mind:

изображение

Thanks in advance!

2

This is an interesting question, but I’ll have to investigate. It might even be possible to use a semi-transparant color, but I don’t think that will work in dark Themes. :wink:

I’ve tried:

SCRProjectHighlightLevel,
HighlighterColor,
SCRProjectHighlight,
SCRTextHighlighter,
SCRHighlighterCss {
   background-color: fuchsia;
   color: fuchsia;
   border: 1px solid fuchsia;
}

but no luck: nothing lights up in neon purple. :frowning:

Actually it’s not hard to pick a suitable mid-tone color using the Show Colors… option in the Highlight color drop-down menu. You have the entire RGB-palette available… And Scrivener remembers your choice, even between writing sessions.

3

Would be great if you could uncover it! :slight_smile:

Actually, transparency would work quite fine. I took the same colours and made a mockup with GIMP. Highlighter at 50% opacity will look like this:

изображение

Still readable. And it must be noted that my text colour is not white, which means that for white text (or less opacity) it will be even better.

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4

Thanks for taking time to look. Too bad nothing worked out. :frowning:

Since there’s no way to replace five default colours at the top of palette and there doesn’t seem to be a way to keep new custom colours on the palette below, custom text colour would’ve been the best solution. Alas.

Thank you anyway. :slight_smile:

5

I have this same issue. It must not be hitting Scrivener’s radar, because there’s been no solution posted. I’m guessing that the only way to currently be able to read highlighted text would be to switch back to light mode (bright white). Like many folks, I hate to have my eyes blasted out of my head by switching modes, but it looks like that’s the only way to go if you want to see highlighted text. I’m glad you asked about it, Jaaaarne.

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6

Here is a long post describing all that was not implemented properly, and why this makes everything more awkward than it should be.

7

Currently I use a rather awkward workaround for this (which is how I made the first screenshot).

изображение

Select text > apply Highlighter > apply Text Colour.

To remove highlighter select text > right click on the Highlighter button > remove colour, right click on the Text Colour button > remove colour. This reverts to your theme default colours. Doing it via right click allows to keep the previously selected colour so you don’t have to open the palette each time and can just click the relevant button the next time you need to use the Highlighter.

It is rather awkward, but at least it allows me to work with what we have at hand without switching to a light theme.

I really hope dark themes get some attention along the road (including those invisible arrows in the Binder). We spend lots of time in front of screens in order to write. I’d say, dark themes should be the default these days. :slight_smile:

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2 Likes
9

A great workaround, thank you very much! :heart:

1 Like