Style preferences
In order to avoid too much fiddling around, OmniFocus doesn’t support styling individual items. Instead, you can style all items of a particular type.
To get to the Style preferences, just choose Preferences from the OmniFocus menu, then click the Style icon. As you adjust the styles, keep in mind that you can always click the Reset button at the bottom of the pane to return to the default settings.
At the top of the pane is a pair of buttons for changing all of your font sizes at once; this is a shortcut if you just want bigger or smaller text in general. Each press increases or decreases all font sizes by 1 point. You can also select particular styles and specify a font size for each one.
On the left side is an outline of all item types that you can style, organized by how they inherit from one another. For example, Next Actions are a type of Actions, and Actions appear in the Main Outline. Each item type uses its parent’s style attributes unless you specifically change them.
You can change the appearance of the following types of items: Sidebars — Everything that appears in the planning mode or contexts mode sidebars, on the left side of a window.
Top-Level Items — The Inbox, Library, No Context, and Contexts items in the sidebar.
Contexts — The individual contexts listed in the sidebar. The background color for this style fills the entire contexts mode sidebar.
Projects — The individual projects listed in the sidebar. The background color for this style fills the entire planning mode sidebar.
Folders — Folders listed in the sidebar.
Main Outline — Everything that appears in the planning mode or contexts mode outline, on the right side of a window.
Groupings — The headers that group together items when you set a grouping in the view bar; larger and bold by default.
Projects — The items that represent projects and single-action lists in planning mode; bold by default.
Actions — Ordinary available actions.
Next Actions — Purple by default.
Single Actions — Blue by default.
Action Groups — Bold by default.
Notes — Smaller and gray by default, but in individual notes you can do as much rich-text styling as you want.
In addition, you can customize the following Status-Based Styles. These styles override any other styles that may be on an item: Completed — Items that have been marked as complete; gray and with strikethrough by default.
Due Soon — Items whose due date is within the “soon” duration as set in the Data preferences; orange by default.
Overdue — Items whose due date has passed; red by default.
Blocked — Stalled projects and unavailable actions; gray by default.
Below the style list is an Action pop-up menu for resetting the selected styles to their default attributes, copying the selected styles, or pasting onto the selected styles.
The controls on the right affect the selected style: Font Preview — This identifies the selected font and acts as a preview of what the font looks like. Note that this only represents the settings that you change with the Choose Font button, not the other attributes below. Click the preview to open the standard Font panel, where you can specify a font family, style, and size.
Text Color — The color for the font itself. For example, next actions appear in purple.
Background Color — A color to draw behind the item. In the case of the Main Outline style or the sidebars’ Projects and Contexts styles, this color fills the entire view.
Shadow — A sharp shadow one pixel below the text; this is most effective in white, for the etched look that many elements in Mac OS X have these days.
Strikethrough — A line drawn through the text, like the default style for completed actions. We’re not sure why you’d want to cross out anything else, but hey, you’re the boss.
Underline — A line drawn under the text, in the color and pattern of your choice.
Row Spacing — This number specifies, in points, how much vertical space the item should have before it. So, essentially, adjacent items get farther apart when you increase this number.
Child Spacing — This number specifies, in points, how much vertical space should appear between the item and its child items. So, for instance, you could make actions in a project appear closer to or farther from the project row itself.
Child Indent — This number specifies, in points, how far to the right to indent children of items of this style. So if you increase this number for projects in the main outline, then the actions inside each project will move further to the right.