Readability of colored text in dark mode

DEVONthink
1

Hello! A few years ago I brought up Scrivener’s cosmetic superpower of lightening colored rich text while using dark mode. The request was noted but then died out.

This is just a reminder that it might be fairly easy to add a lightener. Something like —

Whenever darkmode_p and saturation(old_text) > N
   set brightness(new_text) to brightness(old_text) * 1.2
   set saturation(new_text) to saturation(old_text) * 0.8
   if brightness(new_text) > 1, set brightness(new_text) to 1

—or something similar.

Every night, I find myself pasting stuff into Scrivener in order to work on it and then pasting it back into DT when I’m done. (I always use purple for quotations of other people’s text for the sake of scripting later).

You could even have a checkbox preference that kicks in the lightener at user discretion for users who want colored text to be mainly invisible.

Here’s an image of how colored text in dark mode looks in DT side-by-side with itself as pasted into Scrivener. The DT is nigh unreadable:

Screen Shot 2022-07-17 at 15.25.43
Screen Shot 2022-07-17 at 15.25.431274×1844 260 KB

Thanks again for considering.

2

You could use your own CSS for that. There’s a post on dark mode and markdown css in the forum.

Sorry, I didn’t notice „rich text“ in your post right away. So CSS is not an option.

3

What kind of document did you actually use?

4

Whew! I was thinking, “That seems like a lot of work to turn RTFs into Markdown just to be able to use a slightly lightened CSS font color. What am I not seeing?”

5

That’s a RTF file in DevonThink. Then I copied and pasted it into Scrivener, which lightens and desaturates all colors just a touch to make them readable in dark mode.

I prefer dark mode, but I can’t use it in DevonThink when text is colored using the standard text colors, which are purposefully dark so they are readable against white. So I’m always pasting into Scrivener and then pasting back when I’m done.

The word “night” was supposed to be “nigh,” if that helps make that last sentence into something meaningful.

6

Could you send us a copy of such a document? Thanks!

7

Thanks! The next release will improve this.

8

Hello! The new lighter colors look fabuloso.

Thanks so much for implementing this.

2 Likes
9

Glad to hear that it’s working as expected.