How to change background color and other theming options?

[bastianolea]

Description

I'm trying to change the background color of surveys, along with other colors and styles. Changing backgroundcolor in survey.qmd does nothing, neither does barcolor 🙁

[jhelvy]

You can modify most of this in the yaml section at the top of your survey.qmd file.

There is no yaml item for background color. To do that you'll need to supply a custom css file, like this.

Changing the bar color should be doable like this. (link edited)

[bastianolea]

Thanks for the quick answer!

Using theme: [united, custom.scss] gives me Error in if (theme == "default") { : the condition has length > 1, so I can only use a theme or a custom .scss.

If I only use custom.scss as theme, I am able to change some aspects of the style, like $primary and $body-color, but I can't seem to change the background color.

PS: one of your links seems to be a mostly empty repository.

[jhelvy]

Oh good catch, I think that is indeed a bug on the theme thing. @pingfan-hu do you want to take a look at this? Probably just a simple bug checking the theme, plus I'm not sure why a background color isn't available in a custom SCSS file.

And can you tell me which link seems to be a mostly empty repo?

[bastianolea]

It was the link for the bar color (https://github.com/jhelvy/emse-student-faq), but then I realized changing bar color using barcolor does indeed work, my mistake, I was expecting the empty bar color to change as well (that brings me the question of how to change the empty bar color, which seems to be #ECE8DF)

[jhelvy]

Haha woops, that was a copy-paste error. Completely unrelated link. I meant to link to here. That section shows how to change the bar color. We decided to include things that are specific to surveydown in the yaml (barposition and barcolor), and otherwise the rest of the yaml should work just like a regular Quarto doc (e.g. how to change the themes). Obviously we have a bug there though on providing a custom theme.

[jhelvy]

Just noting this is still on our radar. We have a few other larger mods going on so we'll get to this when those are done. Just merged PR #134 to support multiple languages in the system messages, and we're also working on restoring the session when you refresh the page.

[pingfan-hu]

Hi @bastianolea ! Sorry for the late reply. I was trapped with the cookies thing.
Now the theme thing has been solved. You are free to define a list of themes just like a normal qmd file.
You can test it with theme: [united, custom.scss] in YAML, or any other combinations of bootswatch themes and scss files.

Please install our latest package and test it out:

remotes::install_github("surveydown-dev/surveydown", force = TRUE)

We'll soon publish this update to CRAN as well.