Zotero 7 Beta: Yellow Appears as Very Dark Orange in Dark Mode

poettli

I couldn't find a thread showing this issue for the new design. Sorry if it has already been rised. A showed in the pictures below, the yellow is not yellow in dark mode.

Zotero 7 Beta 56

Dark mode:
https://s3.amazonaws.com/zotero.org/images/forums/u2119014/7t7o27h5afr1x2iv6zbr.png

Light mode:
https://s3.amazonaws.com/zotero.org/images/forums/u2119014/okb8kb4rki6ttoihssvn.png

mjthoraval

This one.
The color is not consistent with the color in the color picker:
https://s3.amazonaws.com/zotero.org/images/forums/u265723/80rordndx8kqh2fxmmxm.png
Windows 10
Zotero 7.0.0-beta.56+9edfcba9a (64-bit)

poettli

Ah right, I missed your thread. Good catch

martynas_b

The yellow color suffers the most from the color inversion and blending that we do in dark mode. We'll try to make it a little bit more yellow, but it'll likely never be as yellow (we have the same issue on iOS app).

kavana

Thanks for looking into it!

If it's of any use, the dark mode plugin (https://github.com/tefkah/zotero-night?tab=readme-ov-file) which has now ceased development thanks to zotero's native dark mode had fairly good color fidelity for highlights in dark mode

martynas_b

@kavana

If it's of any use, the dark mode plugin (https://github.com/tefkah/zotero-night?tab=readme-ov-file) which has now ceased development thanks to zotero's native dark mode had fairly good color fidelity for highlights in dark mode

In zotero-night plugin the actual highlights are almost invisible, only the text is colored.

kavana

That's true! It's also how some other pdf readers (eg adobe) handle dark mode highlights. I hadn't registered it as "different" because I sort of assumed that was how it ought to be handled for colour fidelity in dark mode.

I think I would prefer it to have the same colour and highlight it by colouring the text, as opposed to having different colours and not the highlight border. Or at least have it as an additional "third" display option.

The problem as I see it is that text is white in dark mode, which means that if the actual highlight is given its original colour, the output is unreadable because white text doesn't contrast with light colored highlights. Readable+accessible text rendering should have a strong contrast between the background and the text.

One way to sort this out is to render highlighted text in black, but let unhighlighted text retain its current white colour in dark mode.

Another option would be to use the coloured text option, but show the actual highlight as a border around the whole highlighted text.