colors in Sky 8

[Deborah Patton]

Sky has so more commands than I can wrap my brain around. One of the things I always have had trouble with is background and foreground colors -- I couldn't always tell where I was -- or the highlighted cell which is called the marquee in Sky. As a former Cindex user, I thought my typing was navigating but found I was typing over text in the Grid instead. Drove me nuts. I don't know if v7 has this, but v8 helps me a lot.

Options>Preferences>Colors/Help I changed a few so I now know where I am. 'With Focus' means where the marquee is and 'without Focus' means where it isn't. So foreground or background if you will.

I changed 'Cell, w/marquee' to bright yellow in the Grid

I changed 'Text, w/marquee' to a bright green in the Index Pane

And changed 'Marquee' and 'Header text' both to a bright blue in the Index Pane. Could be that's the default for those two but coupled with the bright green for Text, w/marquee the result is sort of yellow.

I don't label a great deal because I've learned to group on most of the stuff under the Group menu. And what all the dropdown menu options are in Find. Some things I can never recall the keyboard commands for, but know I can find them under Utilities or somewhere.

The more I use these things, the less I label. If I'm indexing a new edition, I usually add 1000 to the locators and correct those to the right one as I read through the text -- working in page order most of the time.

I agree we all work differently but this list is a huge help. I'll be using Sync Headings in the future! Thanks everyone --

Deborah

------- Original Message -------
On Tuesday, March 7th, 2023 at 9:00 AM, nicol...@hotmail.com <nicol...@hotmail.com> wrote:

I don't understand that - Black is a fantastic foreground colour if you want coloured labels. No colour is a fantastic background colour if you want coloured text. There should be a way of decoupling the selection of foreground colour from that of the little coloured boxes in V8 with a bit of extra programming.

On Tuesday, March 7, 2023 at 1:08:23 PM UTC Millis Indexing wrote:

Hi, Nicola,

As I said, I'm not here to change anyone's mind. I was simply sharing my experience, as I also was unsure that the new style would work for me when I first switched. That said, I don't think it's fair to say that Kamm is simply choosing not to change it back. When I contacted him the day after Sky 8 came out, he replied: "The change is needed because there are no colors that work well both as a foreground color (needed to highlight locators in the Index Pane) and a background color as would be needed to highlight the grid row as was done in SI7." It seems to me that he made a conscious choice in order to balance different aspects of functionality in the program.

Best,
Kendra

--
Kendra H. Millis
President, American Society for Indexing, 2017-2018
Theodore C. Hines Award recipient, 2020

Millis Indexing Services
MillisIndexing.com

www.MaineFiberWorkshop.com

On 3/7/2023 7:25 AM, nicol...@hotmail.com wrote:

I think it is still a usability issue that Kamm could change in V8 to make it the same, but he chooses not to.

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[Ruth Ellis]

I struggled with some of the pastel colours in 7 and found you could change the label colours (as well as their names) so I did that to make them stand out more for me.  When I moved to 8 I changed them in there too and I find that the labels in 8 didn't take me very long to get used to at all. I don't have colour blindness but I imagine if I did that the pastel colours would be totally useless. I have really bright colours, which are almost offensively bright, so I can't possibly miss my labels.

 

One of the things that frustrated me in 7 was that sometimes I might use more than one label for an entry, e.g label 1 for locator 1, label 2 for locator 2 because I needed to make different editorial decisions later on. Sky 7 couldn't show that I had more than one label on a main heading very easily. However in Sky 8 I can see the different labels very clearly in the index pane because each locator shows in a different colour.

And yes, really pleased to learn of the Sync headings function, I shall be trying that out as soon as possible.

As an aside, I have fewer crashes with 8 than I did with 7. For those having frequent ones, it may be an memory issue if you are working on an old PC.

[Siusan Moffat]

YES Ruth! That was the trade off for me in Sky 8 - labels not as distinct but I can use more than one in the subs. I wonder if Kamm will every figure a way to merge the two different styles in future Skys.

Siusan

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-- 
Siusan Moffat,
Indexing Society of Canada member
http://about.me/siusanmoffat
absoluteindexing.com

I acknowledge that I live and work in the 
territory of the Anishinaabe, Haudenosaunee, Huron-Wendat,
and the Mississaugas of the Credit River, now home to many
Indigenous Peoples and newcomers from around the globe. I
recognize that decolonization must be an active and ongoing
process of reconciliation.

[Pam Sanchez]

I was having so much trouble with 8 crashing on me (especially when I clicked on the ‘solve widows and orphans’ link in my error scan.  I put in a new solid state drive with TONS of space, and then when the issue didn’t resolve, I upped my RAM.  Still had problems which Kamm refused to address, so we both agreed that I go back to 7, which I did.

Pam

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