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Planned preferences and languages (not implemented)

2026-10-18

The Preferences screen ships only options that work across the whole app. The options below come from the user’s reference (XPPen Notes / Infinite Painter style preferences) and are deliberately left out until the app can support them everywhere.

Why they are missing

The drawing editor uses hard-coded light colours (ChromeInk, ChromeLine, ChromeMuted, literal Color(0xFF…) values in NotebookEditor.kt, NotebookChrome.kt, DrawingToolsUi.kt, PressureCurvesUi.kt, BrushColorPicker.kt and the reader chrome). A theme switch today would only change the home screen and leave the editor light.

Missing options

Option Values in reference What it needs
UI theme System, Light, Dark, OLED Editor, reader, dialogs and pickers read colours from one theme; OLED uses pure black surfaces
Colour mode System colours, Single tone, Dual tone Theme accent model with one or two colours; System colours uses Material You dynamic colour (Android 12+)
Contrast 0–100% slider Theme tokens generated from a contrast level for text, lines and borders
Style Soft, Vivid, Original, Playful, Fresh, Clean, Muted, Grayscale Palette generation rules per style applied to the accent pair
Surface colour Custom colour Second theme colour for panels and bars, separate from the accent
Custom accent colour Colour picker Free colour choice next to the presets
Language System, English, Español, … All UI text moved to string resources, then translations (see below)

Plan

  1. Theme tokens. Add a KnotesTheme with named tokens (surface, panel, ink, line, muted, accent, on-accent, selection) and provide it through a CompositionLocal. Replace hard-coded editor and reader colours with tokens. No visual change in Light.
  2. Light, Dark, System. Add a Dark token set and follow the system setting by default. Add OLED as Dark with pure black surfaces.
  3. Paper stays white by default. Ink colours, templates and exports assume white paper, so dark mode darkens only the chrome around the page. A separate “Dark paper” option can come later; it needs ink colour remapping for display without changing saved strokes or exports.
  4. Colour mode, style, contrast, surface colour. Generate tokens from the accent pair, style and contrast. Keep presets as named token sets so they stay testable.
  5. Tests. Screenshot comparisons of the home, editor toolbar, brush panel, pressure curves and reader in Light, Dark and OLED.

Multi-language (pending)

The app is English only. apps/mobile/androidApp/src/main/res/values/strings.xml holds a single string; every other label, button, hint and dialog text is a hard-coded literal in Compose code (apps/mobile/androidApp/.../*.kt and apps/mobile/shared/src/commonMain/...).

  1. Extract strings. Move all user-facing text into resources: Android res/values/strings.xml for androidApp, and Compose Multiplatform resources (apps/mobile/shared/src/commonMain/composeResources/values/strings.xml) for the shared home UI so iOS gets them too. Use plurals for counts (“3 notes”, “1 pins”) and placeholders for values (“%1$s · %2$.1f px”).
  2. Add languages. Start with Spanish (values-es), the user’s language. Further languages are added as new values-xx folders without code changes.
  3. Language setting. Preferences → Language: System (default) or a fixed language, using Android per-app language support (AppCompatDelegate.setApplicationLocales, locales_config.xml, Android 13+ system settings integration).
  4. Formats. Dates, numbers and units follow the selected locale (DateTimeFormatter, NumberFormat) instead of fixed Locale.US formatting. Canvas sizes keep a dot decimal only in saved data, never in the UI.
  5. Layout checks. Spanish and German text is often 20–35% longer: check the brush panel, toolbox, pill switcher and sidebar for clipping; prefer wrapping or scrolling over fixed widths.
  6. Tests. Run UI tests under a pseudo-locale (en-XA) to catch untranslated or truncated text.

User content (notebook names, typed text, OCR results) is never translated.

Constraints

  • Saved notebooks, strokes and exports never change with the theme.
  • Every new option must apply to the whole app before it appears in Preferences.
  • Preferences are stored on the device only, like the rest of the app’s settings.