JabRef version 5.0
Hello there, I am trying version 5.0 of JabRef on Manjaro Linux. I don't know how previous versions behave regarding what I am about to describe. Suppose I have a group, whose color I set to red and a subgroup, whose color I set to blue. It so happens that, when I select the subgroup, all entries are colored red and none of them are blue.
The behavior I expected was for entries in the subgroup to have two color bars, one red and one blue, so I am able to know all colored groups this entry is a part of.
If I save my database, close and reopen JabRef, the color for the subgroup is unset (erased from the bib file) and only the color for the supergroup remains.
When trying to erase a group's color information myself, I realized there's no way to do that using the GUI. Once you set a color for a group, there's no way to erase it. Even setting the value that is in the color box by default (#FFFFFF) just paints all entries white instead of leaving them colorless. I had to delete the color value from my bib file to fix this.
For my next test, I set two different colors for two groups which have a few entries in common. First, I set one group as purple. You can see in the image below that there is a second group which has some entries that are purple.
I then set the entries of this subgroup to green. All entries that were previously colorless were colored green, while the ones that were already purple remained purple.
In the purple group, which had some entries from the green group, no entries were colored green. Again, after I saved, closed and reopened JabRef, the color information from both groups was lost.
Since I observed that the purple color (which I had set first) had precedence over green, I tried to do the opposite and set the color of the green group first and then set the color for the purple group, but purple still took precedence. I believe this is because the purple group is listed first in my database and in my bib file.
From these tests, it seems to me in that entries can only have a single color. JabRef has some way of prioritizing which color to assign to an entry (supergroups first or maybe simply groups that are listed first in the groups list) and, in case the colors from two groups overlap, JabRef deletes the information regarding the color from one or both groups. At runtime, it also has some way of prioritizing which color to display, as in my second test, purple was displayed on top of green.
I believe that, if an entry is able to be represented by multiple colors, all these problems would go away.
Thanks for taking the time to read this.
JabRef version 5.0
Hello there, I am trying version 5.0 of JabRef on Manjaro Linux. I don't know how previous versions behave regarding what I am about to describe. Suppose I have a group, whose color I set to red and a subgroup, whose color I set to blue. It so happens that, when I select the subgroup, all entries are colored red and none of them are blue.
The behavior I expected was for entries in the subgroup to have two color bars, one red and one blue, so I am able to know all colored groups this entry is a part of.
If I save my database, close and reopen JabRef, the color for the subgroup is unset (erased from the bib file) and only the color for the supergroup remains.
When trying to erase a group's color information myself, I realized there's no way to do that using the GUI. Once you set a color for a group, there's no way to erase it. Even setting the value that is in the color box by default (#FFFFFF) just paints all entries white instead of leaving them colorless. I had to delete the color value from my bib file to fix this.
For my next test, I set two different colors for two groups which have a few entries in common. First, I set one group as purple. You can see in the image below that there is a second group which has some entries that are purple.
I then set the entries of this subgroup to green. All entries that were previously colorless were colored green, while the ones that were already purple remained purple.
In the purple group, which had some entries from the green group, no entries were colored green. Again, after I saved, closed and reopened JabRef, the color information from both groups was lost.
Since I observed that the purple color (which I had set first) had precedence over green, I tried to do the opposite and set the color of the green group first and then set the color for the purple group, but purple still took precedence. I believe this is because the purple group is listed first in my database and in my bib file.
From these tests, it seems to me in that entries can only have a single color. JabRef has some way of prioritizing which color to assign to an entry (supergroups first or maybe simply groups that are listed first in the groups list) and, in case the colors from two groups overlap, JabRef deletes the information regarding the color from one or both groups. At runtime, it also has some way of prioritizing which color to display, as in my second test, purple was displayed on top of green.
I believe that, if an entry is able to be represented by multiple colors, all these problems would go away.
Thanks for taking the time to read this.