At 09:17 a.m. 19/04/2013, Alison Craig wrote:
>Content-Language: en-US
>Content-Type: multipart/alternative;
>
> boundary="_000_17474827509158478EE10BC6B977A3E30CC5A15342exchangeultra_"
>
>FM 9 Version: 9.0p255
>Unstructured
>OS: Windows 7, 64 bit
>
>Does anyone know if any kind of ?guide? exists regarding the best colours to
>choose when creating Conditions?
>
>When I initially set up my Conditions, I spent a lot of time testing to see
>how colours blended when I had multiple Conditions applied to the same text
>(lots of combos ended up being virtually identical onscreen even though the
>combination of underlying colours were quite different). It didn?t make sense
>to use colours in the first place if I couldn?t tell where one combo stopped
>and the next one started.
>
>I now have to add 2 new conditions (on a tight deadline) so I really don?t
>have a lot of time to test things. If someone has put together some kind of
>guide, I?d really love to see it ? if you?re willing to share.
Recently I broke up a very large eBook into three volumes for print. It's the
first time I've using conditionals seriously. I followed the advice in Sarah
O'Keefe's book and avoided having overlapping conditions. I had to play around
a bit until I got useful contrasts.
The book said that FM would show all overlapping conditions as magenta so it
would be a good idea to avoid assigning magenta to a particular condition. In
fact, I never saw magenta at all; all the overlaps that I had in my initial
scheme (subsequently abandoned) came through as a sort of khaki when I did the
conditionals for the first chapter. That's when I decided Sarah was right and
I should not try to piggyback the same conditions.
The scheme I ended up with was five conditions: eOnly, printOnly, Print1,
Print2 and Print3. (I have a navigation scheme built into the e-Version, which
was not appropriate for the print books. The book will never have an omnibus
print edition as it is waaaay too large.)
I picked the brightest possible high-contrast colours for the five conditions
(avoiding magenta by Sarah's advice and blue because the Silicon Prairie
indexing tools use blue for index markers. I also avoided red because Fm8
seems to use it as a warning when conditions conflict in some way.) I think I
had forest green for eOnly, green for Print1, cyan for Print2, salmon for
Print3 and dark blue for printOnly.
On thing I did find was that it is very easy to change the entire colour
scheme. Once I had it pinned down, I just kept a card by me with the colours
on it, so I didn't have to think about it when repeatedly swapping condition
markers between {a colour} and {As Is}.
HTH, maybe a little bit, anyway...
Helen
