Selecting Colours for Conditions

[Helen Borrie]

At 09:17 a.m. 19/04/2013, Alison Craig wrote:
>Content-Language: en-US
>Content-Type: multipart/alternative;
>        boundary="_000_17474827509158478EE10BC6B977A3E30CC5A15342exchangeultra_"
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>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