Astute Forum Members will have spotted that there are some new options at the top of the Reply window which allow us to add colour to our messages.
I’ve been adding colour manually for the last two years in order to bring greater clarity to some of my more technical prose. However, the method I used for this was a bit clunky, and probably beyond the ability of many users.
The new icons are shown here:
To add a colour, first highlight the word(s) you wish to be in that colour by dragging the pointer across, click the foreground icon and choose a colour from the palette.
If you’d like to select from a wider palette, click on More Colors which will open a separate window.
The large box to the right marked Highlight depicts the colour under the pointer, and the rectangular box below it has the colour on which you last clicked.
When you’re happy with your selection, click on the Add button, and the Selected Colour will be applied to the word(s) you’d highlighted.
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Yes! This is first I’ve heard of this feature being rolled out to everyone!!!!
No more coding needed @Transparent - I bet you’ll miss it a little… I will no longer have to manually edit your posts for the occasions that the code fails to work……
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Not all possible colours are available for selection from the on-screen palette. What happens if you want a particular colour that isn’t there?
As an example, I use a certain light brown colour every time I refer to the Northern Territory for smart meters or Arqiva, the company that operates that network. The colour is defined by a number in “hexadecimal notation” which is #C0A980
To obtain that light brown, I open the More Colors dialogue box as before, and enter the required colour number into the lower-right box:
When press Enter any word(s) I had selected are now shown in light brown.
You can play with entering numbers into that box if you already know how to define colours by using the HTML #rrggbb system. But I find it easier to choose a new colour from a web page that allows me to experiment.
To copy a colour that another Forum Member has already used, select the text containing that word and copy it (I use Ctrl-C).
Then move back to the Reply window where you were writing, and paste the text into your own sentence.
This enables you to copy the same colours I’ve used for technical terms, but without you needing to know what my HTML colour code is.
One you have pasted the coloured word into your own reply, you can then change the letters to spell out what you want.
Some of the colours I’ve used are subtle variations, eg:
The difference between SMETS1 meters and those which use SMETS2 software…
So both versions of Smart Meter are shown in a form of magenta/purple, which is just enough for the reader to understand the difference without their brain having to specifically register whether the word ends in a figure 1 or 2.
Just checking over this topic on my optimising escapades - Feel like I’ve learnt more about making my comments even more colourful.
One thing I’ve noticed though - when I try to copy and paste the fancy-coloured words from your comment, @Transparent - it defaults back to black. Like this: SMETS1
Am I doing something wrong?
I think I know why that is @Jess_OVO . BBCode is something that Transparent loves, but is actually deprecated on inSided. It’s no longer guaranteed to work properly and unfortunately I don’t think inSided would action any bug reports that are BBCode related. You’ll need to do it manually for it to have a better chance - being able to get into edit mode helps as well!
I suspect it’s probably very much removed from Control as well if memory serves. I really need to dig through the Inspired Community again and find the full details…
Then again… Maybe I can pull off a bug report here… Hmm...
Ah ha! Found the culprit.
The colours are applied using CSS during rendering, rather than being just part of the data. When you copy/paste, you’re simply copying the raw text as-is without formatting unless you’ve got it in Edit Mode when you copy the text. There is no way to workaround this if you don’t have permissions to edit the content the colour is on.
Strictly speaking, inSided can’t really fix this and I don’t think CKEditor can either. Not without some serious re-engineering which probably isn’t worth the effort for such a small enhancement/fix. It would almost certainly get pushed down to the very lowest priority level so I don’t think it’s something that can be requested.
You will notice that most of the coloured text I post use the same colour for the words/phrases on each occasion. That’s done by me keeping a look-up table in a text window and copy-paste from there into the topic.
a portion of my master colour-insertion table
Once I’ve got all the text composed including these color-tags, I then copy the end-color tag into all the required places.
Multi-coloured text is stored as a pedantic list of tags for each letter. So Forum is described thus:
Most (but not all) topics won’t immediately convert the color-tags to the required coloured text. This is a bug in Insided’s code.
Simply click Edit the post again and then immediately Save. Miraculously it succeeds on the second attempt.
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