Themes, backgrounds and colour¶
Themes¶
A theme sets a deck's background colour, font and text colours. Manimble includes seven:
| Theme | Background | Font | Accent |
|---|---|---|---|
| Midnight (default) | Black, white text | Helvetica Neue | Violet |
| Chalkboard | Dark green, chalk-white text | Chalkboard SE | Yellow |
| Ember | Near-black, warm white text | Helvetica Neue | Orange |
| Paper | White, near-black text | Helvetica Neue | Blue |
| Parchment | Warm off-white, brown text | Palatino | Brick red |
| Slate | Dark blue-grey, light text | Avenir Next | Teal |
| Terminal | Near-black, light text | Menlo | Green |
You choose a theme when you create a deck with File ▸ New Deck…. To change it later:
- Choose Format ▸ Theme, or click Theme in the toolbar, and pick a theme.
- A sheet shows the slide on screen rendered in that theme.
- To change only the current slide, tick Apply to selected slide only.
- Click Apply.
Applying a theme to the deck changes the theme's constants in common.py (FONT, TEXT_COLOR and others) and the
background colour in manim.cfg, as one undoable step. When you switch between a dark and a light background, the
sheet also offers to swap whites and blacks throughout the deck, so text that doesn't use the theme's colours stays
readable.
Note
A theme changes text that uses its constants, such as text inserted by Manimble or typed into layouts. Text and shapes that set their own colours in code keep them.
Slide background¶
To change the background of one slide, or of every slide:
- Choose Format ▸ Background…, or right-click an empty part of the slide and choose Format Background….
- Choose a solid colour, or click Choose Picture… to fill the slide with a picture.
- Drag the Transparency slider to blend the colour or picture with the deck's background. The slide previews each change.
- Click Apply for this slide, or Apply to All for every slide. Reset Background returns to the deck's background.
The background is written as one marked line at the top of the slide's construct method: the camera's background
colour, or a full-slide picture at the back.
Dark mode and inverted colours¶
Manimble can show your slides with different colours without changing the deck, which is useful for checking how a deck looks in a dark room, or for presenting on a dark background.
- View ▸ Dark Mode (⌃⇧⌘D), or the moon in the toolbar, swaps light and dark neutral colours: white becomes black, light grey becomes dark grey, and so on. Saturated colours such as red and blue are kept.
- View ▸ Invert Colors (⌃⇧⌘I) turns every colour into its complement, like the macOS accessibility setting: white and black swap, orange becomes blue.
- View ▸ Recolor Images Too applies the mode to pictures as well. It is off by default, so photos keep their colours.
These modes affect the canvas, the thumbnails and the built-in slideshow. Exports and the animated show use the real colours.
Make the change permanent¶
To write the new colours into the deck itself, choose Format ▸ Apply Dark Mode to Deck… or
Format ▸ Apply Inverted Colors to Deck…. Manimble rewrites colour values throughout the code and the background
in manim.cfg, and gives objects drawn in a default colour an explicit one. Every slide is re-rendered, which takes
about a second per slide. The whole change is one undo step.
The written version can differ from the view-only mode for colours that the code computes, per-character colours, gradients and pictures, which are left as they are.