Appearance

DragonWriter lets you tailor how the app looks and how the writing surface reads. These choices live in your account settings, and a couple more live in the scene editor itself.

Choosing a site theme

On the Appearance tab of your settings, the Theme control lets you pick a colour theme. Each theme is a pair of colours — a primary and an accent — and the whole app is re-tinted to match, in both light and dark mode. There are a dozen themes to choose from, such as Purple & Green (the default), Red & Gold, Blue & Orange, and Teal & Pink. Each option shows a small swatch of its colours so you can preview it before saving.

Your theme choice follows you across the site. Note that light and dark mode themselves follow your device or browser setting; the theme decides the colours used within each.

The underlying site-wide colour palette — the base look everyone starts from — is set by an administrator.

Editor font

Also on the Appearance tab, Editor font chooses the typeface of the writing surface in the scene and note editors. There are serif faces such as Lora, Merriweather, Playfair Display, EB Garamond, and Libre Baskerville, and sans-serif faces such as Lato, Nunito, and Source Sans 3. Each option in the picker is shown in its own typeface so you can see exactly what you are choosing.

This is also the font each new story starts with: when you create a story its story font is seeded from this choice. Changing it later only affects stories you make afterwards, and you can set any story's font (and per-scene or per-passage fonts) from the scene editor — see Fonts.

This setting changes only the editor. Reading mode keeps its own serif regardless, so your published and preview text stays consistent. The default keeps the site's built-in serif and loads no extra font.

Editor background

If your site has Unsplash enabled, the Appearance tab also has an Editor background section where you can set a background image for the scene editor's writing surface. Search Unsplash, pick a photo, and it fills the writing area behind your text — the image stays fixed while the text scrolls in front of it. A Dim the image for readability option lays a soft veil between the photo and your words if a busy image makes text hard to read, and Remove background clears it.

This is entirely personal: it's only ever shown to you, in your own editor. It is never part of your story, never published, never exported, and never seen by collaborators. Choose an image you can comfortably read your writing on — legibility is up to you (the dim option helps). The photographer is credited in the corner of the editor, as Unsplash's terms require.

Your profile picture

On the Profile tab of your settings, Profile picture controls the avatar shown beside your name in the forum and on your published stories. You have two options:

Upload a picture. Choose an image and it is cropped to a square and scaled down in your browser before it uploads, so you always get a tidy square avatar. Accepted formats are PNG, JPEG, and WebP.
Keep the DragonWriter logo and choose a background colour for it. This is the default, and you can set any colour you like or leave it on the automatic colour derived from your username.

If you have uploaded a picture, a Remove picture button reverts you to the logo avatar.

Editor preferences

A few appearance choices are saved directly from the scene editor rather than from settings, because they belong to the writing view:

Panel layout — the editor's left panel (story structure) and right panel (notes, goals, and more) can each be collapsed, and the editor remembers whether you left them open or closed.
Font size — the editor and reading views each remember a small, medium, or large text size.

These are remembered per person and apply whenever you open the editor. Your chosen theme and editor font from settings apply here too.