Overview manipulation: Difference between revisions

This page contains information on what's possible to manipulate when it comes to the [[overview]] in EVE Online as well as some practical examples. The overview is essential in showing you what's happening around you. More information about how to set it up according to EVE University standards can be found on the [[Installing the EVE University Overview]] page.

While you can make any number of changes to the overview through the .yaml file, almost all of the things that can be changed ingame is much easier and more reliable to change ingame, with the exception of changing colours, font sizes, styles etc of the tab names and the ship labels / brackets in space.

The ''Overview Tabs'' settings ingame will allow you to add html-formatting, but most people prefer to edit this outside the client anyway due to the highly restrictive input fields. It's much easier to edit those values in a proper text-editor than trying to do it in a tiny little window that shows but a few letters at a time.

Whenever you select a target or hover over a bracket in space you'll get some information about the entity. By manipulating the .yaml file you can customize this to show the information in different colours, font sizes or even with personalized linebreaks etc. These changes will affect your combat notifications as well and show the parts regarding players and player owned entities appropriately formatted, which is an added bonus that leads to improved readability of onscreen combat messages. If you decide to add manual linebreaks or other formatting code, be sure to check that the onscreen combat messages are still readable.

[[image:overview_settings.png|thumb|Access your overview settings with your [[Keyboard_controls#Modifying_Shortcuts|shortcut]], chat-channel command or through the regular right-click context manu.]]

{{important note box|It's highly recommended that you make a backup of your current overview first and work from a copy instead.}}

The easiest way to manipulate your overview is to save your current overview and then export it into your documents folder. Then you can open the overview file in a text editor and quickly view your changes ingame by saving the file and importing the new settings. That way you can easily tinker with your overview until you have it just the way you like it.

! style="background-color:#222222;" | OS

! style="background-color:#222222; text-align:left;" | Location of the folder

| {{icon|win|38}}

| {{icon|mac|38}}

The overview is saved in the .yaml file format and can be edited in pretty much any kind of text-editor, like the commonly used [https://notepad-plus-plus.org/ Notepad++], but of course the standard notepad editor that comes with Windows works as well. Simply right-click the file and open it with your favourite text-editor to start editing. The majority of the changes you're likely to make (tab and label edits) will be at the very end of the file.

The overview is stored in .yaml files where you can write plain html-code and it'll be parsed just fine. Attributes and values are split across individual lines, with {{co|violet|-}} markups identifying and grouping the variables. Here's an example with changes {{co|slateblue|highlighted in blue}} and comments in {{co|lightgreen|-- green}}:

{| style="font-size:90%;"

<pre<includeonly></includeonly>>

| valign="top" | [[image:overview_settings_overview_tabs.png|thumb|320px|In the '''Overview Tabs''' you can quickly edit the name and formatting of your tabs.]]

| valign="top" | [[image:overview_settings_ships.png|thumb|320px|In the '''Ships''' tab you can change the pre- and post-formatting for ship labels and brackets in space.]]

:You can use simple html-coding such as normal {{co|violet|<color&gt;</color&gt;}} and {{co|violet|<font&gt;</font&gt;}} tags, but also things like linebreaks {{co|violet|<br&gt;}}, bold {{co|violet|<b&gt;</b&gt;}}, italic {{co|violet|<i&gt;</i&gt;}} etc.

; {{co|coral|Colours}}

:For colours, either use the simple '''colour name''' or the '''HEX-based''' {{co|violet|0xFF}}{{co|magenta|RRGGBB}} format, so if you wanted the colour {{co|green|green}} you could either do {{co|violet|<color&#61;green&gt;}} or {{co|violet|<color&#61;0xFF}}{{co|magenta|008000&gt;}}.

See '''w3schools'''' [http://www.w3schools.com/html/html_formatting.asp text formatting] or [http://www.w3schools.com/colors/colors_names.asp colour names] pages, or '''wikipedia's''' [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_colors web colours] page if you're new to html-coding.

For a list of symbols that work in EVE you can check [[User:Cassiel_seraphim/Symbols|Cassiel's Symbols]] page. It's possible there are more symbols that might work, so feel free to check out [http://www.theasciicode.com.ar/ ASCII Codes] or [http://copypastecharacter.com/symbols Symbols] for inspiration, but remember that some of those symbols won't work in EVE.

This is an example of one of the pre-saved overviews that were available at the time of writing this guide. On the left is the unedited version of the overview, on the right is the code with the changes {{co|slateblue|highlighted in blue}} that enables the colour-coding and font-changes.

These changes are possible to do ingame, albeit tricky since the window and editing fields are extremely limited. But the game will accept and change these values from inside the game, so there's technically no need to export and edit the files if this is all you want to edit.

In this example I removed the bolding and simply made the font a little larger, because I have my interface scaled to 90% and my context-font set to 11 (which the tabs won't use for some reason). I also added some colours and removed the dots and just used regular space to widen some of the shorter-named tabs and rearranged the tab order itself.

{| style="font-size:90%;"

| valign="top" nowrap |

<pre<onlyinclude></onlyinclude>>

| valign="top" nowrap |

{| style="font-size:90%;"

| valign="top" nowrap |  

| valign="top" nowrap |

<pre&lt;noinclude&gt;&lt;/noinclude&gt;><nowiki>

</nowiki></pre&lt;noinclude&gt;&lt;/noinclude&gt;>

| valign="top" | [[image:overview_manipulation_tabs.png|thumb|300px|Tab appearance.]]

| valign="top" | [[image:overview_manipulation_labels.png|thumb|Ship labels in space and in the overview list.]]

| valign="top" | [[image:overview_manipulation_combat_logs.png|thumb|Ship labels affect the combat log as well.]]