(Discussion) Text Colors...

[crueldespot]

Cruel Despot, recovering dialogue text - colorer

I changed the text color for dialogue on my first few posts, but then repented.

It all started when I got the bright idea of copying and pasting a thread into a seperate document to preserve it. With white-on-black text, that is a pain in the butt. So, I changed the "forum skin" on my account/edit options from Enworld Default to Player's Handbook, which is black-on-white. This reversed the color of the default text, but the other colors stayed the same. yellow looks good on black, but yellow on white will give you a headache.

I encourage everyone to take the other forum skins for a test drive before they decide on their own text color scheme. You may decide, like me, to give up on altering the text color.

And the moral of the story is that most good ideas aren't. Then everyone lived happily ever after. The end.

 

[msd]

Having tested all of the themes, it looks like the colors that are consistently visible under all the themes are RED, DARK ORANGE, and DEEP SKY BLUE. Maybe there are others that I didn't notice.

As an aside, if any of you are using the "hive" theme, I would urge you to get yourself to a fashion counselor...

 

[El Jefe]

It's so much easier for me to pick up on colored text, that I'd recommend putting all dialogue in e-novels in a different color than the descriptive prose. Here, I feel that the colored text enhances the gaming experience.

But, Pbartender, I deliberately bold my color of choice to make it more visible and easier to read against the default style setting. If that makes things harder to read for you, then I'm doing the wrong thing for the right reason. If you have a suggestion for a better color (other than plain, uncolored, "default" text), then I'll gladly change to accommodate you. Even a simple comment like "it's too dark" or "it's too light" would help me move in the right direction.

 

[Pbartender]

I don't really have anything against using different colors... A couple of years ago when very few (and no one I knew) were doing it, I tried it with one of my PbP games, and it helped a lot. It's makes it really easy to pick out spoken text, and highlight game mechanics or OOC comments.

The trouble is picking a good color to use, especially when the messages boards have such a wide variety of styles. Some colors obnly look good on light backrounds, some on dark, some look terrible on either, and only a few look good on both.

So...

I encourage everyone to take the other forum skins for a test drive before they decide on their own text color scheme. You may decide, like me, to give up on altering the text color.

And the moral of the story is that most good ideas aren't. Then everyone lived happily ever after. The end.

I decided long ago to the same thing.

If everyone was using the default, I'd say just make sure you stick to the paler colors... but those are all unreadable on the style light backgrounds.

No offense, KB, but that long speech that Leonard gives in the sewer-clearing adventure took me three times to read through.

Bolding helps, but it's still a strain to read.

I see lots of people admitting to contributing to the problem (I really appreciate the honesty), but I'm wondering if it's actually a problem for anyone else. If I'm the only one bothered by this, I'll suck it up and deal with it, otherwise we need to find a solution...

The solutions would be...
1. Make sure everyone's using the same style.
2. Use only a very small number of colors that look good in everything.
3. Don't use colors at all.

Would it help to have more color's to pick from? PHP allows any numerical code colors and standard web-based color codes. Take a look here and here. There are hundreds of colors to choose from.

 

[The Goblin King]

I too use Stealth and it is very difficult to read colored text at times. I don't think standarding a color scheme will work. We can't even get everyone to use the same character sheet. I would just ask that people who use colored text stay away from the paler colors.

 

[Pbartender]

I too use Stealth and it is very difficult to read colored text at times. I don't think standarding a color scheme will work. We can't even get everyone to use the same character sheet. I would just ask that people who use colored text stay away from the paler colors.

See, that's the funny part, because I'd be telling everyone the exact opposite... "Use the pastels and stay away from the darker colors"... Because I use the default style with the dark background.