Rather than a colo(u)r, why not another character like the asterisk?
It would increase the number of tags but should achieve what you want.
E.g. A document tagged as
***Thingamees
**Doodahs
Wotsits
…has a different emphasis to one tagged with…
***Wotsits
**Thingamees
Doodahs
Obviously, you can have as many or as few modifiers as you like or you could use the asterisk for primary focus and, say, the tilde for secondary focus.
Thanks for the suggestion – and I have toyed with it, but had decided against it for the simple reason that you suggest, namely there being too many additional tags being created.
That being said, the benefit would be that I would be able to search for “**TagA” as opposed to “TagA”, and with the former, find all those articles that I deemed to have as their main point, whatever TagA’s topic was.
A further benefit would be that I could sort the tags ‘alphabetically’ in the column/3-pane view, and I would then automatically ‘see’ the “**TagA” and “~TabB” at the front end, so to speak – which might not be the case with a coloured tag.
Of course, the other possibility would be to simply pop whatever the ‘main’ topic is, into the Comments/Keyword section of the particular file, since this could also be used on a search basis.
Regardless, I just wanted something simple that could be adjusted on the fly, as the initial tagging was done, and something that would primarily be very visual in nature. Your suggestion offers additional benefits that would not accrue were I to only use a ‘colour’, and accordingly makes more sense.
My initial sticking point, was having many hundreds of Tags, given that I had all my work in a single DB. With my now having split things, the number of tags has also declined, and this might very well be something I will look at going forward!
Thanks again – given me some serious food for thought. 