Okay, firstly I thought you were mainly just referring to the lack of a light mode editor mode within dark mode as being the problem. I readily agree there are important tweaks to be made to the text editor and its associated algorithms—that’s what I glossed over a bit when I said it’s a WIP. Glossing over isn’t the same as dismissing them.
To go into further detail on some of these:
- The reason for colours looking less legible is the Mac version’s extensive system for ensuring text remains as such even when coloured. It has a default setting of desaturating coloured text that falls outside of certain thresholds we’ve tested, and brings them back into a range of saturation and brightness that is better suited to a dark background. E.g. if you compare the blue used for headings and interface labels in the tutorial, on Windows the colour remains the same as in light mode (I think), and is to my eye a bit difficult to read. On the Mac the blue is considerably brighter and less saturated.
- “It would be great if such an option was offered in windows. There is no option to keep the editor light when enabling dark mode, or to change this afterwards, as is the case on Mac OS.” Right, that’s something on the todo list, I don’t think anyone would disagree with that. I think the way they have it implemented though, it would take a specific theme to do it.
- Working similarly to the text colour desaturation algorithm is a background colour (highlight/styles/etc.) adjustment that mutes everything, and this one cannot be turned off (because it would very rarely ever be desirable to do so as there is a strong conflict between light and dark where it comes to what is readable behind text). In addition to the technical note below on white highlights—you wouldn’t even see a shock white highlight in the Mac version, even if you deliberately set it. You’ll get dark grey highlight if you try. This goes for those tip boxes as well—on the Mac version the bright yellow is muted down to a dull brown. So this as well is something that needs to be fixed.
There are also some things that are down to differences between the platforms (and perhaps some things we’ve coded in specifically as well, which may fall under the previous category, but I’m not positive without delving through archives—they may or may not be easy to fix:
- Text not appearing black on the Mac, I think that black text in the Mac editor is ignored (everywhere), and treated as having “no color”. If you pop open TextEdit on your Mac and set View ▸ Use Dark Background for Windows off, deliberately colour some sample text black then when turning dark backgrounds back on you’ll see the text is pure white. Where this can be a problem is that literally coloured black text does tend to leak in from Word, Web copy and so forth—and in normal circumstances it is impossible to see, so you don’t really know it has happened.
- Using white as a background colour to mean “no color” is something the Mac has done for a long time. There was actually a bug that popped up in 10.12 I think, where they broke that behaviour and suddenly everyone that had ever used highlights in Scrivener had white highlights in their editor. We had to patch that out ourselves, though Apple did later finally fix it. Point being: the Windows editor has to be aware of that, and by and large it is—but what you’re seeing are artefacts from when it had a spotty implementation for doing so.
- Another thing that would be nice to have fixed is the treatment of cf0 in RTF, as this ends up being black on Windows, but is how the Mac stipulates “no colour”. This has long been a point of friction between the two platforms. Black text is treated as no-color on Mac, but in the Windows editor it is treated literaly. You can search for “black text full screen” in the Windows bug/tech boards here and find this going back all the way to day one.
It’s just now a whole lot more obvious if you use a dark background colour everywhere.
Should it be fixed? I think so, especially in dark mode—but it might not be easy to do so universally (consider that one might actually want black in some cases, how do we distinguish between the two intentions?). Again, it has been around since beta 1 in 2010, so, yeah.
I don’t actually see bold all by itself doing what you describe. I do see some character formatting styles carrying their “highlight” of white text along with them (and weird things like some bullets). This is what I referred to as some early issues from way back when this project was made. Are you seeing this happen in newly created samples, and if so what does it take to see it? Myself if I create a style that looks just like those examples, or even if I take the present-tense Mac tutorial and open it on Windows, I don’t see this problem. That’s what I meant by us needing to clean up the formatting in this project. It has artefacts caused by old bugs in it that have since been fixed, but have left a permanent trace thanks to how RTF works, best I can tell.
I haven’t tried it extensively, but my advice would be to avoid highlights in general (since they don’t mute), and make sure your default formatting on the Mac isn’t accidentally black text, and that when you paste in from web pages and such, either use Paste and Match Style, or be sure to clear text colour after doing so. It’ll honestly probably be easier to fix patchwork problems like that on Windows where you can see it, though—especially since the Documents ▸ Convert ▸ Text to Default Formatting command will strip out cf0 formatted text.
So to combine with the above, how does your experience look if you do the following:
- Create a tutorial using the Mac and save it to PC.
- Select all of the documents within it and reset the formatting to default.
There are still some issues, like pure colours, table cell highlights and so forth (and lists are still… yeah), but again the many woes in this ancient alpha-built tutorial you’re using as an example will not be present. When I made that first copy, the style engine itself wasn’t even working at a fundamental level when I started with it. They got that patched up so I could make the tutorial—so I’m not surprised there are old glitches with it.
Sorry, it’s in the same place it has been since v1, so I didn’t think to annotate that statement. It is for the moment in Appearance: Colors: Editor section, with the Editor and Text settings. This is where you will need to restart frequently if you’re picky and don’t just want black on white.
Again, I don’t know what you mean by bold text being highlighted, but if the background is white and the highlight is white, the tutorial will go back to looking exactly like it does always if you set the editor to white and the text to black, in settings. That formatting has always been there, that’s what I’m getting at, just like most of the text has always been black in that project—it’s just an invisible problem when you have a white highlight on a white background.