Color carries meaning. In a single glance it can separate protagonists from background players, mark recurring themes, or make a timeline immediately readable. Today we add a simple, practical tool to MuseTag’s palette: the .Color standard modifier.

This is not an attempt to make your prose paint-by-numbers. It’s a pragmatic hook for the many visualization and editing tools that help authors shape stories. .Color allows you to suggest a display color for an entity — so timelines, interaction graphs, editor highlights, and other visual helpers can adopt a coherent, author-driven palette.

What .Color does

  • .Color assigns a display color to an entity for graphical tools.
  • The modifier is global in scope: it is intended as a persistent visual attribute of the entity across the document.
  • The parameter is normally invisible (use parentheses). We accept colors in the standard CSS formats (hex #RRGGBB or #RGB, rgb(), hsl(), and standard CSS color names).

Simple examples:

@@Holmes.Color(#ffcc00)             # Holmes will be rendered as a warm orange in visual views
@@(Holmes,Watson).Color(steelblue)  # convenience: assign the same color to both entities
@@.Color(#666666)                   # set a color for narration / null entity contexts

Note: we intentionally do not document a visible parameter for .Color. Color values are normally metadata for tools, not text for readers. If an author chooses to use a visible parameter, that is an unorthodox usage and will not be recommended in the docs.

Why use .Color?

A few concrete ways tools can exploit the color attribute:

  • Timelines: event bars or presence bands can use the entity color so a reader sees at once who is active when.
  • Interaction graphs: nodes and edges colored by participant make relationship maps faster to scan.
  • Editor highlights: occurrences of an entity can be accented with its color to help visual tracking across long texts.
  • Filters and views: authors can toggle color-based layers (e.g., show all “blue” characters).
  • Publishing exports: color hints can be propagated to diagrams or visual assets.

.Color is purely a hint — tools should still offer themes and accessibility checks (contrast, color-blind palettes) and may normalize or remap color tokens to an active project palette.

Design choices you should know

  • CSS color formats are accepted. This keeps the modifier flexible and compatible with most toolchains.
  • The parameter is invisible by convention. Colors are metadata; they don’t normally appear in the text output.
  • .Color is a global attribute. It is expected to be declared for an entity once. If a document contains multiple .Color declarations for the same entity, tools should decide on a deterministic policy (e.g. last-seen or project-level overrides). In typical practice, authors set a color once per entity.
  • Grouping is supported for convenience: @@(A,B).Color(...) behaves like setting the color for each entity separately.

Small, but powerful

.Color is intentionally lightweight. It does one job: give visual tools a reliable hint about how to present entities. Because it’s simple, many different visualizations and pipelines can adopt it without friction.

Here is a short, slightly more elaborate example showing colors used together with modifiers you already know:

@@Holmes.Color(#ffcc00).Type(character)
@@Watson.Color(steelblue).Type(character)
@@221B_Baker_Street.Color(#cfaea6).Place

## Chapter 1 @@(Watson).Pov

@@(Holmes,Watson).Dialog[
--- Hello, Watson. @@(Holmes).Voice(intrigued)[--- The game is afoot.]
--- Indeed, Holmes. @@(Watson).Voice[--- Quite so.]
]

A timeline or graphing tool can now render Holmes in orange, Watson in blue, and 221B in the warm neutral tone supplied.

Accessibility and good practice

Colors are visual affordances — they can improve clarity but can also introduce problems if misused. A few recommendations:

  • Prefer high-contrast choices if you plan to highlight text.
  • Use palette tokens (project-defined names) in larger projects so you can change themes centrally.
  • Don’t rely on color alone to convey critical information (also annotate or tag semantically).

Where this fits in the MuseTag workflow

.Color belongs in the same family as other global modifiers that describe persistent entity attributes. It’s metadata for tools; it shouldn’t alter the narrative itself.

We’ll update the interactive demo and companion tools to honor .Color in upcoming releases. Meanwhile, you can start using the modifier in your manuscripts today — tools that read the YAML spec or the quick reference can implement color-aware views easily.

A small creative note

We tried to avoid prescriptive rules: your fiction isn’t a chart. But imagine opening a complex timeline and, in a single glance, seeing each protagonist’s arc in a color you’ve chosen — it can change how you edit and where you focus.

We’d love to see how you use .Color. Share palettes, interesting visualizations, or surprising workflows on our GitHub Discussions.

Happy coloring!