Colours and swatches

A swatch is a colour with a meaning: "Highlight", "Important", "Reference". The palette on the bar is where you choose from those meanings while you read; you set them up under Settings ▸ Colours.

Choosing a swatch

Click a swatch on the bar to arm it; whatever you mark next is made in that colour. Each swatch also answers to a key: a for the first swatch on the bar, b for the second, and so on. The letter follows the swatch's place on the bar, so if you drag the swatches into another order the letters move with them, and the colour you use most can always be a.

A swatch taken off the bar keeps its colour and its meaning but has no letter, because there is nothing on the bar to press.

A swatch is a fill and an outline, both at once, and a closed shape such as the rectangle, the oval or a polygon takes both. Right-click a swatch and choose Edit Fill… or Edit Outline… to change either. A swatch whose fill has been emptied draws as a ring; one with a fill draws as a solid square. See Shapes and freehand.

Shapes, line style and colour without touching a swatch

Four flyouts stand at the foot of the tool strip, after the drawing tools: Shapes, Line style, Border colour and Fill colour. A fifth, Marking, stands where the highlighter's own button used to be. Each is a small button with a chevron; press it for a menu or a grid of colours.

• Shapes arms a drawing tool — line, arrow, rectangle, oval or freehand — the same as pressing its button on the strip.
• Line style sets the width, the dash and the arrowheads a new line or shape is drawn with — the same controls as the style bar, reached from a menu instead.
• Border colour and Fill colour open a grid of colours — a row of bright ones, a row of greys, and the full range shaded lighter and darker — with none first among the greys in both, and a Show Colours… button down to the system colour panel.
• Marking offers highlight, underline and strike-through with pictures, the quicker way to what the highlighter otherwise cycles through one press at a time.

A swatch is armed, or a colour is chosen — never both. Picking a colour from Border or Fill does not touch any swatch: it un-arms whichever one was in hand, so the palette shows no ring around any of them, and the colour picked is what the next shape or line is drawn in until a swatch is pressed again. Arming a swatch always wins back — that is what a swatch is for. This is the whole answer to drawing one plain rectangle without disturbing a preset colour you use for something else.

Giving a swatch a meaning

CaseLeaf ▸ Settings… ▸ Colours lists every swatch with a Means field. Type what the colour is for, once, and it shows in the swatch's tooltip.

A swatch with nothing in Means still works; it falls back to its letter, or to a number if it has none. But a palette of unnamed colours means nothing to whoever reads the document later, including you.

Editing a swatch's colours

A swatch carries two colours, an outline and an optional fill. In Settings ▸ Colours each row shows both as small chips: click one to open the colour panel on it, ⌥-click to clear it. A cleared outline or fill is none, not black or white, and the chip draws itself hollow to say so.

The same two colours can be reached from the bar: ⌥-click a swatch to edit whichever half it is showing, or right-click it for Edit Fill… and Edit Outline….

Adding and removing swatches

Settings ▸ Colours has Add and Remove under the list. Add puts on a new swatch with a plain colour and no name; Remove takes the selected one away, and refuses if it is the only swatch left. Restore Defaults puts back the eight swatches CaseLeaf ships with, names and all.

Unticking a swatch's On bar box is the gentler version of removing it: the colour, its meaning and its style stay as they were; it is simply off the bar and has no key until it is ticked again.

Keeping a mark's whole look in a swatch

A swatch can hold more than a colour: the fill and its opacity, the outline colour, the line width, whether the line is dashed. Select a mark you have drawn and got right, and Notes ▸ Colours ▸ Keep This Mark's Look in the Swatch puts all of that on the armed swatch, so pressing that swatch again reproduces the whole look. Notes ▸ Colours ▸ Make the Swatch a Colour Again takes the look off, leaving a plain colour.

Carrying a palette with you

Notes ▸ Colours ▸ Save the Colours as… keeps the whole palette under a name you can choose again from Use the Colours. Send the Colours… writes it to a file for somebody else, and Take the Colours From… reads one back.

Keep These Colours with This Document writes the palette into the document itself, so it opens on another machine with the colours it was marked in.

Watch: a short video for this page is still to come.

Shapes and freehand · Contents