Suggestions for quick formatting

Hello fellow Omni-enthusiasts,

I keep “re-discovering” OmniOutliner, and this time identified some workflow improvements that would really make it more “sticky” for me:

  1. easily change the font: I understand it isn’t Markdown, but perhaps equivalently I could easily toggle between two font settings? Usually all I care about is “normal” vs “fixed-width”.

  2. easily change color: this is comparatively minor, but related to the same. It would be nice to be able to select-and-mark text as being of a certain color (a sort of “highlight”)

I don’t see direct menu-items for this, but presumably there’s some way to make this happen with either Keyboard Maestro or Omni-Automation, curious if anyone else has achieved anything similar.

Regards,
Agam

As for (2) it seems less important since I’ve discovered “highlights” (which, strangely, are not in the menu, but show up in the theme-customization sidebar), which are linked to function-keys and can be customized.

So really the only need is “quick font selection” (or, even just mark as fixed-width font).

You can create new named styles, including styles that change only the font. However, you must choose a specific font (e.g. Consolas) rather than a class of fonts (e.g. fixed width). The app’s help can guide you through the process… look under ‘using the sidebar’. Once you have a new named style, you can drag it upwards to assign it an ƒ-key shortcut. When you wish to revert to a variable width font, you can simply uncheck it.

The reason the ‘highlights’ are not in the menu is that they are pre-fabricated named styles and are actually part of the template rather than the application. Which means that you can create (or edit) templates that have different named styles (or none at all). If you want to use your new font style in any new documents, you’ll want to add it to a template. If you wish to add it to existing documents then you will want to add it to a template and then use Format > Apply Template Theme… when you open an appropriate document.

By the way, the highlight styles change only the background for the text. You can also have styles which change the font colour, or combine multiple font formatting options.

Of course, Omnigroup’s support can aid you with any of these tasks.

2 Likes

These are great leads, thanks!

1 Like

Just tried this and it worked beautifully.

Feel stupid for not discovering this earlier.

Thanks again!