6.99.38 — ink in six colors

Ink has six colors.

Picking a color

One button in the toolbar, filled with the color in use, opening the six:
Ink, Red, Orange, Green, Blue, Purple. The color applies to the next stroke
and never to what is already on the page, so changing it is not an edit. The
choice is remembered between drawings.

Each color carries its name rather than being a colored square alone — a color
is no label at all to a reader who cannot tell two of them apart, or who is
listening. The default is called Ink and not Black, because it is the one
the theme is applied to: on a dark theme it draws white.

The colors were measured, not chosen by eye

Every one clears 4.5:1 against the light theme's background and against both
dark ones, after the theme has been applied. The weakest are green at 4.6:1 in
light and orange at 7.0:1 in dark. A seventh color needs the same two numbers
before it belongs in the set.

Keeping the hue on a dark theme

Ink is stored as one color on transparency and the theme is applied where the
ink is shown — that is what lets a page written on a light screen read on a
dark one, and why drawings saved before any of this still follow the theme.

The filter was plain invert, which flips hue along with lightness: a red
annotation came out cyan. It is now invert(100%) hue-rotate(180deg), which
flips the lightness and puts the hue back — what PencilKit does. A dark red
becomes a light red. Black still becomes white, so every drawing saved before
this version is unaffected.

Measured in two engines rather than one: the six colors come back byte-identical
to the filter specification's own matrix in Blink, and within 2/255 of that in
WebKit, which is what the iPad runs.

A pen tap now reaches the tools

Tapping Erase, Undo, Cancel, Done or the color button with a Pencil did nothing;
a finger worked. The dialog refuses touchmove so that a stroke dragged over the
toolbar is not handed to Scribble as handwriting, and refusing it is enough for
WebKit to call a tap a drag and synthesize no click at all. A finger stays inside
the movement the browser ignores; a Pencil does not.

The tools are served from pointerup as well now, for a pen only. A click
arriving within a moment of one is the same tap twice and is dropped, so a
finger, a mouse and the keyboard are unaffected.

Choosing a color puts the eraser away

Picking a color says the next thing is a stroke. Leaving erase mode on was worse
than inconvenient — the reader meant to write, and what they got instead took
away strokes they meant to keep. The menu also closes on the choice, including
when the color chosen is the one already in use.

What a file written by this version means elsewhere

A stroke carries the color it was drawn in, and every stroke is given a color the
palette offers as it enters the canvas — so the picture and the strokes stored
beside it can never disagree. A drawing opened by an older build draws its
strokes black while showing the colored picture; nothing is lost, but saving it
there would flatten it.

Also

• The color swatches line up with their names. A 16px dot in a slot built for a
  34px icon sat 8.8px high and hard against its label.
• dev/ipad.sh --dark and --light switch the development container's theme.
  The e2e harness pins enforce_theme to light for deterministic screenshots,
  which silently overrode every per-account choice.