Themes

How the app, the wall display, and the printed pages look, and how to change it. Set from System Settings → Appearance — for the walkthrough, see Getting Started.

Three screens, three choices

Trusty Track has three surfaces, and each has its own theme:

Surface	What it covers	Who picks it
App	Your own screen — Race Control, the roster, this settings page	You, on this device
Display	The wall display and the projector	The operator, for every screen in the room
Printables	Pit passes, licences, heat sheets, certificates, results sheets	The operator, for every printer

App is per device. It is a preference about the screen in front of you, saved on this laptop or tablet only — it never touches another screen, and it never touches a printed page. Two people running the same race can each have their own laptop looking different.

Display and Printables are per install, the same as the rest of System Settings. That is deliberate: the Displays panel already sends every wall screen what to show from the operator's own list, and walking to each screen to set a theme on it individually would defeat the point of that. Every printer at the event prints the same look for the same reason — a pack's check-in desk is often more than one laptop, and every pit pass should look like the same event no matter which one printed it.

"Field Uniform (default)." The Display and Printables pickers offer this first, selected by default. It is not a fourth look of its own — it is Field Uniform's own Display (or Printables) colours, so an install that has never opened this page looks exactly as it always has. This option used to be called "Match App theme," which suggested it would follow whichever theme your own screen is set to; it never did, on either surface — the App theme lives only on this device and never reaches a wall display or a printer, so there is no App picker for either of them to follow, and the option is named for what it actually shows now.

Changing Display repaints a wall display or projector that is already open, live — no reload needed. It reaches the screen over the same connection that already tells it what to show, so a theme picked mid-event takes effect on every open screen within a moment. Printables is different: a printed page is not a live connection, so a theme change there only affects the next thing you print — nothing to "repaint" on paper already handed out.

The seven themes

Theme	Look	Best for
Field Uniform	Scouting blue and gold — unchanged	The default. Nothing to decide
Under the Lights	A darker screen for your own laptop, plus the usual projector black	An evening race, or a gym with the lights dimmed once racing starts
Old Glory	Red, white, and blue	A patriotic-themed derby
Clear Sight	Bigger, bolder, higher-contrast	A venue with harsh light or a projector fighting daylight, or anyone who wants the screens easier to read
Sawdust & Pine	Warm, wood-toned	A banquet where the certificates get framed, or a keepsake feel over a spreadsheet one
Trail Colors	Green and trail-marker orange	A fun day, or a pack that finds navy-and-gold a little stiff for a Saturday morning
Newsprint	Black ink on white paper, almost nothing else	Tight print budgets — see the printing note below

Each theme also sets its own Display (wall/projector) and Printables (paper) look — picking a theme on the App picker does not, by itself, change what the wall or the printer show. Set Display or Printables to it directly if you want the same theme in the room and on paper too.

Clear Sight is the one theme where every tier of text — down to the faintest captions and hints, not just headings and body copy — is dark enough to read easily against its background. Every other theme keeps its lightest labels a shade paler; a placeholder in an empty field is the one place any theme, Clear Sight included, keeps that lighter touch on purpose, so an empty field still looks empty rather than already filled in.

A swatch for each theme, and a live preview of all three surfaces below the pickers — nothing here is saved until Save Settings is clicked.

Printing and ink

Most themes print the pit passes, licences, heat sheets and certificates as they appear on screen — a coloured header band costs about the same ink whichever theme it is.

Two themes are the exception:

• Under the Lights prints lightened. A dark screen and a dark projector do not argue for a dark pit pass — the paper stays light, with a cooler palette so it still reads as "the same event, at night."
• Newsprint prints in a deliberately ink-minimal way: one ink colour instead of two, a thin rule in place of a filled header band, and the decorative textures (the chequered band, the security wash, the certificate's background pattern) faded to a fraction of their usual weight. It is the theme to pick if a pack is printing sixty pit passes on a home inkjet that is already running low.

Every theme's printed pages stay legible photocopied in black and white, and Clear Sight and Newsprint are the two built to survive that specifically — neither leans on a shade of grey to carry meaning.

What is not themed

• Layout, spacing, and rounded corners never change. A theme changes colour, weight, and decoration — never where anything sits on the page or how big it is.
• Timer status colours, the error colour, and medal colours (second and third place) stay the same in every theme — they carry a fixed meaning (armed, fault, second place) that a brand palette should not be free to recolour.
• Only Trail Colors' hue changes; per-den colours are untouched. Each den already has its own colour chip on the roster, independent of any theme, and no theme pulls den colours into more of the screen than that.
• No custom or uploaded themes. All seven are fixed, reviewed, and shipped with the app — there is no colour picker for building your own.

Every screen themes now

Trusty Track's colours come from one shared set of names ("the primary colour," "the accent colour") instead of being written out fresh on every screen, and that conversion is finished — every screen in the app, the wall display, and the printed pages now picks up a theme change.

A few more colours stay fixed, for a different reason than the ones listed above: they are not standing in for something a theme should be free to recolour — they are just what the object actually is.

• A car's avatar keeps the same colour under every theme, the same way a name is spelled the same way twice. It is how you recognise a car at a glance across a busy roster.
• The paintbrush and gavel icons on the Awards page keep their painted-wood brown — a wooden handle is brown no matter which theme is picked.
• The timer diagnostics page's serial-traffic log is styled like a technician's console, light text on a near-black panel, the way any developer console is.

If part of a screen still looks unfamiliar after picking a different theme, it is one of these — not a screen still waiting its turn.