How do we modify themes (default light mode or no dark mode)?

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phario

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Aug 19, 2025, 8:06:49 AMAug 19
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I am working with the most basic pretext document found via the quick start guide: https://pretextbook.org/doc/guide/html/tutorial-first-document.html

using a local installation and compiling via Visual Studio Code. 

I'm struggling to understand the documentation and how we're supposed to implement the options. In particular I want to turn off dark mode. There is documentation here: 


but I can't make heads or tails out of it. 

Where should I be setting "@provide-dark-mode = off"?

Thanks,
phario

Oscar Levin

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Aug 19, 2025, 9:35:41 AMAug 19
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Those publication options are implemented in the file "publication.ptx" inside the "publication" folder.  That file should have lots of commented lines with examples.

The guide uses the @ symbol to indicated attributes.  So if it says something like, set html/@example to "no", you would enter that as, <html example="no">.


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phario

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Aug 19, 2025, 11:01:39 AMAug 19
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Hello!

Thank you. I eventually understood. I hope this isn't taken as criticism, but I find the documentation extremely difficult to understand. Perhaps this is because it requires experience in XML? 

For people who want to know how I did it: 

The documentation section for dark mode is in section 

publication/html/css 

and references @theme

I had to do this: 

<html> 
...
 <css theme="denver" provide-dark-mode="no"/>
...
</html> 

Oscar Levin

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Aug 22, 2025, 10:14:34 PMAug 22
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Glad you figured it out.  I agree that the documentation is tricky at first; I struggled with the @attribute thing for a bit.  But now it makes distinguishing attributes and elements of the xml much easier. 

By the way, just to clarify on thing, if you didn't set @provide-dark-mode="no", then there would be a toggle to switch between modes.  The toggle persists in local storage, and is initially set to match the user's browser preferences.  So if someone usually picks light mode and has that set up in their browser, it should default to light mode.

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