Theming

What this is: how to control Publisher's light/dark theme and chart palette. For the full public walkthrough (editor UI and per-chart annotation examples), see Theming Publisher.

Publisher renders charts, tables, and dashboard tiles with a light/dark theme. You can change it in three places, from broadest to narrowest:

1. The config file publisher.config.json, at the instance level.
2. The in-app Theme Editor at /settings/theme, which lets an operator iterate against the live UI.
3. Per-chart # theme.* annotations inside a .malloy file, for one-off styling on a single view.

These cascade: defaults → instance config → editor → per-chart annotation. Each layer only overrides the keys it sets. (A per-environment layer is reserved but not yet applied.)

The Theme Editor writes to a runtime store (DuckDB, persisted alongside other server state). It's blocked when publisher.config.json has frozenConfig: true, the same way every other runtime mutation is.

Theme object shape

{
  "theme": {
    "defaultMode": "light",
    "allowUserToggle": true,
    "palette": {
      "series": ["#14b3cb", "#e47404", "#1474a4"],
      "background":            { "light": "#ffffff", "dark": "#1e293b" },
      "tableHeader":           { "light": "#5d626b", "dark": "#cbd5e1" },
      "tableHeaderBackground": { "light": "#f5fafc", "dark": "#1e293b" },
      "tableBody":             { "light": "#727883", "dark": "#e2e8f0" },
      "tile":                  { "light": "#f5fafc", "dark": "#0f172a" },
      "tileTitle":             { "light": "#5d626b", "dark": "#94a3b8" },
      "mapColor":              { "light": "#14b3cb", "dark": "#14b3cb" }
    },
    "font": { "family": "Inter, sans-serif", "size": 12 }
  }
}

defaultMode accepts "light", "dark", or "auto". With "auto" the viewer's OS preference (prefers-color-scheme) wins until they override it from the header toggle. Setting allowUserToggle: false hides the toggle and locks viewers into defaultMode.

palette.series and font are shared across modes; the rest of the palette keys take an explicit { light, dark } pair. mapColor is the saturated end of the choropleth gradient on # shape_map and # segment_map visualizations.