Initially when I tried to come up with a font color for the forum I based it on the scientific study which provided a
png image of what was determined to be the average color of all the stars in the sky. At first I thought that the .png image provided by the study was closest to color fff8e9, based on my visual approximation, but actually I looked again recently at the .png file and I found technical information within the file making it exactly fff8e7, which was close to my initial guess. I changed the font colors on the forum to reflect the more accurate information.
I introduced a [s]third[/s] fourth style into the forum, which is pretty similar to the default Inferno style. It uses the blue and green colors that this forum used to have as the default between July and October 2003. I was able to get those colors back by viewing them from October 2003 at
archive.org as you can see
here.
I recently discovered that when it comes to
customizing the templates on the forum, that instead of having to customize the templates in all styles manually, the process would be made easier by setting up one as a "parent style", so that the templates in the "child styles" below it would also be customized as well at the same time. That reduced the workload of modifying templates on the forum, as there now is only one parent style "Inferno" that I need to modify the templates on.
I changed the font of the Alternative style to
papyrus, trebuchet ms, arial, helvetica. It is listed in that order to let the browser know the priority a font is given. The browser checks the computer's hard drive and operating system for fonts, which is where the fonts are stored. Standard fonts come with an operating system but you can find places such as
this site which allow you to install extra fonts. In a Windoze computer they are located in the folder
WINDOWS\Fonts in the form of .ttf files which can be copied into there. For example, If you view the Alternative style without the papyrus font installed on your computer, the browser will then try to display it using the trebuchet ms font if that is installed on your computer, and then if not it will try to display it using the arial font, and so on. That is why it is good to have common backup fonts in the list as I have done, so that hopefully one of them on a list will work. But if none work that does not mean that no text will be displayed. Rather it means that either the browser or the operating system; and I'm not sure which one; will choose one.
Here are the specifications of the board colors that are common to all four styles:
background: 000000
table border: 777777
category strips: 333333
table header: 000000
table footer: 333333
first alternating color: 000000
second alternating color: 000000
Form Width 720px
User Control Panel Form Width 480px
Message Area Width 640px
User Control Panel Message Area Width 380px
Code Block Width 480px
Here are some of the specifications of the four individual styles:
- Inferno (Parent style)
font color: fff8e7
small font:
main font size:
font family:
normal links: ff0000 (text decoration = none)
visited links: ff0000 (text decoration = none)
hover links: ffff00 (text decoration = underline)
category strips + table header/footer font color: ff9933
highlighted font
font color: 00ff33
font size: 24pt
font family:
- Inferno-converse
font color: fff8e7
small font:
main font size:
font family: tahoma, samanata
normal links: ff9933 (text decoration = none)
visited links: ff9933 (text decoration = none)
hover links: ffff00 (text decoration = underline)
category strips + table header/footer font color: ff0000
highlighted font
font color: 00ff33
font size: 24pt
font family: tahoma, samanata
- Gaia
font color: fff8e7
small font: small
main font size: medium
font family: tahoma, verdana, lucida
normal links: 6688ff (text decoration = none)
visited links: 6688ff (text decoration = none)
hover links: ffff00 (text decoration = underline)
category strips + table header/footer font color: 33bb33
highlighted font
font color: ff0000
font size: xx-large
font family: georgia bold italic
- Alternative
font color: bbbbbb
small font: small
main font size: medium
font family: papyrus, dustismo, trebuchet ms, arial, helvetica
normal links: dd7711 (text decoration = none)
visited links: dd7711 (text decoration = none)
hover links: ffff00 (text decoration = underline)
category strips + table header/footer font color: 22aa22
highlighted font
font color: ff0000
font size: xx-large
font family: georgia bold italic