Sparx Systems Forum

Enterprise Architect => Suggestions and Requests => Topic started by: Viking on June 29, 2023, 03:43:14 pm

Title: Change color of properties
Post by: Viking on June 29, 2023, 03:43:14 pm
Hi, for a UML Class Diagram I am using colors for the shapes. Some colors are dark, so I need white text (instead of black).

I followed the instructions in https://sparxsystems.com/enterprise_architect_user_guide/16.0/modeling_fundamentals/set_element_font.html to change the colors. The documentation says “This setting affects all text in the selected element except for the Note compartment text”.

But only the color of the element name changes. I did not find a way to change the colors of the attributes / properties according the color of the class name.

The solution is certainly too simple. But please tell me :-) V.
Title: Re: Change color of properties
Post by: Paolo F Cantoni on June 29, 2023, 07:48:08 pm
Hi, for a UML Class Diagram, I am using colors for the shapes. Some colors are dark, so I need white text (instead of black).

I followed the instructions in https://sparxsystems.com/enterprise_architect_user_guide/16.0/modeling_fundamentals/set_element_font.html (https://sparxsystems.com/enterprise_architect_user_guide/16.0/modeling_fundamentals/set_element_font.html) to change the colors. The documentation says “This setting affects all text in the selected element except for the Note compartment text”.

But only the color of the element name changes. I did not find a way to change the colours of the attributes/properties according to the color of the class name.

The solution is certainly too simple. But please tell me :-) V.
IIRC, the solution is simple; there is no solution.  I, too, wanted this over a decade ago.  Try a bug report/ feature request, but don't hold out hope.

Paolo
Title: Re: Change color of properties
Post by: Viking on June 29, 2023, 09:58:21 pm
IIRC, the solution is simple; there is no solution.  I, too, wanted this over a decade ago.  Try a bug report/ feature request, but don't hold out hope.
[/quote]

Many thanks, Paolo.

I have to tell the management that unfortunately they cannot read most of the text. This is certainly not good for the reputation of the tool.
Title: Re: Change color of properties
Post by: Geert Bellekens on June 29, 2023, 10:06:17 pm
I have to tell the management that unfortunately they cannot read most of the text. This is certainly not good for the reputation of the tool.
Or you could simply not use dark colors if you can't change the font color. :o
Doing something else would not be good for the reputation of the author of the diagrams 8)

Geert
Title: Re: Change color of properties
Post by: Viking on June 29, 2023, 10:59:39 pm
I have to tell the management that unfortunately they cannot read most of the text. This is certainly not good for the reputation of the tool.
Or you could simply not use dark colors if you can't change the font color. :o
Doing something else would not be good for the reputation of the author of the diagrams 8)
Geert

The colors are standard colors used by the management and they are expected. That's why asking this forum.
Title: Re: Change color of properties
Post by: BobM on June 29, 2023, 11:55:49 pm
I had my experience with color demands by management and some are logical.

Eg. I had a competitor for the company applying colors for customer reports where they were using the colors green for all mistakes by their company, orange for shared responsibility, and green for mistakes made by the competitor (which was us).

Customer was very focused on the amount of reds on the chart and less on the green (which was way larger)
Unfortunately they didn't specify properly to their sales to not share this report with customers who might show it to competitors where we could simply point out the psychological trick.

Therefor I will do my best to help you formulate the feature request for a potential workaround:

1) Ask to add text color to the Legend element item details option (which seems like a logical request, I'm surprised this isn't already the case)
2) use tags on each attribute in order to apply the text color to the element
Title: Re: Change color of properties
Post by: Viking on June 30, 2023, 03:56:41 am
I had my experience with color demands by management and some are logical.

Eg. I had a competitor for the company applying colors for customer reports where they were using the colors green for all mistakes by their company, orange for shared responsibility, and green for mistakes made by the competitor (which was us).

Customer was very focused on the amount of reds on the chart and less on the green (which was way larger)
Unfortunately they didn't specify properly to their sales to not share this report with customers who might show it to competitors where we could simply point out the psychological trick.

Therefor I will do my best to help you formulate the feature request for a potential workaround:

1) Ask to add text color to the Legend element item details option (which seems like a logical request, I'm surprised this isn't already the case)
2) use tags on each attribute in order to apply the text color to the element

Thank you, BobM. That is more than I expected. Great.

I think it would be already very helpful if the text color of the element name gets inherited by the properties / attributes.
Title: Re: Change color of properties
Post by: Eve on July 03, 2023, 08:18:12 am
The colors are standard colors used by the management and they are expected. That's why asking this forum.
If you're trying to set standard colours for all users, set the standard colours or define a diagram theme to match those colours.

Standard Colors (https://sparxsystems.com/enterprise_architect_user_guide/16.1/the_application_desktop/standardcolors.html)

Diagram Theme Options (https://sparxsystems.com/enterprise_architect_user_guide/16.1/the_application_desktop/diagram_theme_options.html)
Make sure that you change the defaults for the attributes and operations too as they have their own colours set at this level.