Text color support

[marcotrevisan]

It would be very nice to be able to set the font color to a selection of text.

Thanks and regards!

[max-nextcloud]

Hey @marcotrevisan

Thanks for your feedback!

We have the callouts to raise attention for a particular text part.
We're mostly focusing on the content and structure of the document. Colors sound like a design / layout heavy focus for me and other apps such as Nextcloud office might be better for that purpose.

Could you elaborate what you would use this for?

[marcotrevisan]

@max-nextcloud thank you for getting back to me!
It's not something I personally use, I highly prefer callouts, but some of my colleagues do every day in their Confluence documents (and have edited quite a lot of pages in this manner), so when I proposed them to try copy-paste and start over on Collectives, that missing feature was their first concern.
I too was surprised, because it didn't seem to me such an important feature... you never know what keeps an user tied to a particular product :-)

[max-nextcloud]

@marcotrevisan Thanks a lot for your fast response.

What was your impression of how these colors were used? Mostly to highlight things like a text marker? I can well imagine using a color code to mark different parts of a text according to some criteria.

[marcotrevisan]

@max-nextcloud I just did a rapid check on their pages. Their use of colors seems to be for more than a single purpose:

• Green / red and other intermediate colors are used to report on the status of some stuff described in tables. Those tables are like scorecards for i.e. keeping track of a long running project, all fits on a single page, I have to say they're pretty nice looking and easy to read and hence I think the people watching them will find them useful.
• Other colors as "inline titling", the color is always applied to bold uppercase text as I'm seeing it now.
• Finally what seems to be some simple "style work" to make the page better looking.

The text is also bold when the color is used to relate to the status of something, or an attention point.

I hope this helps. Regards!

[yonas]

I'm surprised there's no text color support yet.

[juliusknorr]

Tiptap as our editor library has a color extension which should be fairly easy to integrate https://tiptap.dev/docs/editor/extensions/functionality/color

However the more tricky question is how the colors would be written to markdown. We could use html tags I guess, but could be a risk for making markdown files less readable and usable without rich rendering. May be an acceptable trade-off though.

[alehwess]

In shared analyses and protocols it would be nice for highlighting new comments or changes.

[magneticflux-]

After updating to Nextcloud 33, if you really need a little bit of color and don't mind going a bit out of your way, you can use $\LaTeX$ support like so: $\color{red}\textsf{red}$.

• $\color{red} red$ $\Rightarrow \color{red} red$
• $\color{red} \textrm{red}$ $\Rightarrow \color{red} \textrm{red}$
• $\color{red} \textsf{red}$ $\Rightarrow \color{red} \textsf{red}$ (for sans-serif in Nextcloud, not available on GitHub)
• $\color{red} \textbf{\textsf{red}}$ $\Rightarrow \color{red} \textbf{\textsf{red}}$ (for bold sans-serif in Nextcloud, not available on GitHub)

Inline equations don't wrap text, so if you have a long colored section you need to individually wrap each word in a separate equation. I used this script to do that for a paragraph:

for w in (string split ' ' $argv)
	echo -n '$\color{red}\textsf{\textbf{'"$w"'}}$ '
end

Save as colors.fish, run with fish colors.fish "my sentence that I want to be colored". Splits on spaces, remember to escape apostrophes and use the ` symbol for opening single quotes since it's $\LaTeX$. Outputs look like this:

$\color{red}\textsf{\textbf{my}}$ $\color{red}\textsf{\textbf{sentence}}$ $\color{red}\textsf{\textbf{that}}$ $\color{red}\textsf{\textbf{I}}$ $\color{red}\textsf{\textbf{want}}$ $\color{red}\textsf{\textbf{to}}$ $\color{red}\textsf{\textbf{be}}$ $\color{red}\textsf{\textbf{colored}}$

[mejo-]

With Nextcloud 34, support for highlighting/marking text will come: #8309

The color is not customizable and it's just one color, but maybe it still helps some people who monitor this issue.