Color values for custom stylesheets

Question

I’m having trouble using RGB color values in a custom stylesheet. I would like to use a color not listed under Commonly Use Color Values (under Help). For example, dark blue composed of R: 43, G: 48, B: 145, comes out as orange when I enter \Color 4348145. What am I doing wrong?

Answer 1

drwww, the answers others have given are correct for Paratext 8.0 and earlier. (I also appreciated the formula.) However, before you spend too much time on this, you might want to be aware that Paratext 8.1 introduces two additional options which I hope are both better than using the old OLE numbers.

1. Use one of the color aliases which ships with Paratext, such as “$blue_text”. This is recommended because different themes can then supply the shade of blue which works best within that theme. Currently, the only themes are for Light and Bright highlighting, but in the future we’d like to provide high-contrast and colorblind-friendly themes. High-contrast would use light text on a dark background.

2. Use a standard RGB hexcode, prefixed by an “x”. For example, x005404 represents a dark green. This is the option anon848905 mentioned. (BTW, I like using colorizer.org to fiddle with colors.)

Paratext 8.1 Help covers the new codes via this help topic: “How do I implement a custom stylesheet for my project?”

Comments

anon468618:

However, before you spend too much time on this, you might want to be aware that Paratext 8.1 introduces two additional options

I feel pretty confident saying that Paratext 8.1 is still at least a few months from a general release. Waiting may not be a good option.

Answer 2

Paratext does not use RGB color codes, it uses something called “Windows colors” or “OLE colors”. There are websites where you can look these codes up, e.g. https://www.htmlcsscolor.com/hex/00008B. There you can find the info by searching for “OLE color”. Unfortunately, it seems that you can only enter hexadecimal values at this website to search for colors, so you would need to convert your decimal numbers to hex first (or use another tool/website to do it).

Comments

Thank you for the clarification. No wonder RGB colors weren’t working! That being the case, it might be a good idea to update the following in Help:

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It is not hard to set up a conversion tool in a spreadsheet to go from decimal RGB to OLE. Here is my example
in Google sheets using anon848905’s formula:

drwww, that dark blue you want is OLE [Phone Removed]
I’ve passed your report onto the help file team.

Answer 3

Paratext does use RBG colors, but they are identified using the OLE system which follows a formula of:
OLE = red + (green * 256) + (blue * 256 * 256)

According to my sources on the development team PT8.1 will allow for entering the code using the RGB Hex value.