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Color Coding; A howto on the many colors of the world
Topic Started: Sep 4 2015, 01:47 AM (15 Views)
Apokolypze
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COLOR : It's a beautiful thing!



Intro:

The BBcode tag system that this forum uses is versatile, robust, and extremely powerful. It allows for a massive level of customisation in post formatting, which I may end up going into in another post. The Color tag in particular is a powerful tool for defining which sections of a post are what character, among other uses. In this post, we will go over the various ways to apply and customise the 'color' tag in your posts!


The basics:

The most basic use of the color tag is accessed through the posting interface, in the form of a "color" drop down menu. Simply highlight the text you want to colorise, and pick the color from dropdown menu that you want to use. The forum will automatically apply the correct code to your post.

This option, while simple, leaves you with only a few choices of what color to use. See the next section for how to access a much wider range of colors.

Customisation:

If you cant find the color you are looking for in the dropdown menu, chances are the system does actually know the color, you just have to tell it what you want. This is achieved through editing the color tag in your post. Below is an example of a color tag.

Code:
 
Uncolored Text [color=red]and red text[/color]

This example produces: Uncolored Text and red text

As you can see, just like all BBcode, the color tag requires a tag for both start ('color') and end ('/color').[1]

The '=red' portion of the code is the details, or settings, of the code. In this section, we are telling the color tag what color we want the text to be. When you are colorising your posts, don't overwork yourself! Just type the color you want in this space, and 90% of the time the color you want will be produced.

A few examples are listed below


  • Red
  • Blue
  • Green
  • Yellow
  • Orange
  • Purple
  • Maroon
  • Tan
  • Gold
  • Lime
  • Brown
  • Pink
  • Skyblue
  • Lightblue
  • Lightgreen
  • Beige
  • Chocolate
  • Crimson
  • Magenta
  • slateblue
  • Black
  • white


There are at least 140[2] of these 'named' colors that will work on this forum, which is quite the selection!

Advanced Control: For advanced users only!

The other way to control the color tag is through hex color codes[3] An example of this is below.

Code:
 
Uncolored text and [color=#ff0000]red text![/color]

This example also produces: Uncolored text and red text!

Lets break down this 'hex color code' : Posted Image


  • The # simply tells the code that this will be a hex color code, rather than a named one.
  • Each of the following 6 characters is a number between 0 and 9, or a letter between A and F
  • The code counts in base 15, with the Letters A-F representing 10-15 in a single digit. A = 10, B = 11, C = 12, and so on. Therefore, the lowest possible value for a character is 0, and the highest is F.
  • The first two characters represent the red portion of the color you are trying to make. The higher these values are, the more red is in your final result.
  • The middle two characters represent the green portion of the color you are trying to make. The higher these values are, the more green is in your final
    result.
  • The last two characters represent the blue portion of the color you are trying to make. The higher these values are, the more blue is in your final result.


In most cases, one can read a hex number by ignoring every other character, because the difference between the left character in a pair tells us more than the right. That is, it’s hard to see the difference between 41 and 42; easier to gauge is the difference between 41 and 51.

Posted Image

The example above has enough difference among its left characters to make the color easy to guess — lots of red, some blue, no green. This would provide us with a warm violet color. In the second example, the left characters (9, 9 and 8) are very similar. To judge this color, we need to examine the right ones (7, 0, and 5). The closer a hex color’s left character places are, the more neutral (i.e. less saturated) it will be.

Don’t let the code intimidate you. With a little creativity, hex colors are a tool at your disposal. If nothing else, next time someone asks if you can solve a problem with code in any language, you can simply say:

Quote:
 
“Shouldn’t be harder than parsing hexadecimal triplets in my head.”

[1] The end tag of BBcode is always identical to the start, but with a forwardslash infront of the word. Examples include /color, /quote, /size, etc. Think of the / as meaning "end", so the end tag means 'endcolor', 'endquote', 'endsize', etc.
[2] A full list can be found here
[3] This site can help you make a hex code for literally any color in the visible light spectrum, which you can paste into the color tag for easy color customisation!
Edited by Apokolypze, Sep 4 2015, 01:49 AM.
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