Custom Themes

Author your own theme, save it, and apply it on any diagram exactly like a built-in one.

The built-in catalogue covers a lot of ground, but sometimes you want your own palette: brand colours, a house diagram style, or a notation of your own. Custom themes let you author exactly that, save it, and reuse it. A saved custom theme behaves just like a built-in one: pick it on a tab and the tab takes its colours. Custom themes work for everyone who can edit the tab, signed in or not.

Building a Theme

Open the Tab Style dialog from the Theme & canvas button in the bottom-right corner of the editor, and press Colours under Fine-tune. In the Colours panel, page to the end of the theme list and choose the New theme card to open the theme builder in place of the theme grid. (To start from a built-in theme instead, hover its card and press Copy: the builder opens with that theme's colours filled in.) The builder is fast by default and deep on demand:

Give the theme a name, then set the Base colours: Background for the canvas, Fill for element fill, and Stroke for outlines. From just these three, livediagram derives sensible defaults for everything else, so a usable theme exists after three clicks.

Text sits beside them in the same row. On a new theme it follows the Fill colour, staying readable against it, until you set it yourself. A copied or edited theme keeps the text colour it already has.

The Pattern section (open to start with) picks the backdrop pattern, static or animated, and sets its opacity. There is no pattern colour to pick: it tints itself from your background.

Expand Per-shape colours, an advanced option, to give each shape kind its own fill, outline, and text, which is how you reproduce a notation like "diamonds are amber". A shape kind you leave alone uses the base colours, and its reset button puts it back.

A live preview across the top shows a small diagram in your in-progress theme, with the real pattern behind it, so you see the result before saving. Every colour box can also copy its colour and paste it into another, which saves retyping a brand colour. Save theme stores the theme and applies it to the active tab; Cancel (or Back) leaves without saving.

Tab StyleTab StyleColours‹ BackNew themeNameMy themeBase coloursBackgroundFillStrokeTextPatternPer-shape coloursCancelSave theme
The theme builder: a live preview, the name, the four base colours, the Pattern and Per-shape colours sections, and Save theme.

Saving and Reusing

Custom themes belong to you, not to a document, so they are listed at the end of the theme list in the Tab Style dialog on every tab and every document you open. As a guest they are kept with your browser's guest identity, and if you sign up after creating themes as a guest, they carry over to your account.

Applying a custom theme saves its colours on the tab and its elements, so collaborators see the same look; only you see the theme itself in your theme list.

Managing Your Themes

The Explorer has a Themes entry under Library in its sidebar where you can manage them all in one place (see Themes Library). Each is shown as a preview card you can Edit, Duplicate, or Delete, beside a New theme card. In the dialog's theme list, hovering one of your theme's cards offers Edit and Delete too.

Editing and Deleting

Editing a theme opens the same builder again, and Save changes updates it and applies it to the active tab. Deleting one asks you to confirm first, and is safe for documents that still reference it: they fall back to the default look and keep rendering rather than breaking. If you delete a theme that the document you have open is using, the tabs using it revert to the default theme straight away so the change is visible.

To tweak a built-in theme, press Copy on its card and edit from there. The shipped catalogue stays read-only, so your edits never touch the originals.

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