Charles Kerr posted <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, excerpted below, on Tue, 18 Apr 2006 11:57:23 -0500:
> Duncan wrote: > >> a) I need my font colors prefs back! I prefer light text on a dark >> background, and actually use a military-green type window background. >> With that sort of background, some of the default colors don't show up >> well /at/ /all/. > > What would you (and everyone else) expect to see in a colors tab? > What would you _use_? Speak now or forever hold your peace. :) > > Duncan, do you mean that your gtk theme with the dark background > doesn't fix the GtkTreeView colors correctly? If so, shouldn't > we ask the theme maintainer to fix that bug, rather than Pan hack > around it? I think the theme is fine. It's rather a case of the non-theme colors (denoting quote levels and the like) not accounting for the possibility of a light on dark theme, therefore failing to contrast sufficiently with it to be easily readable. Screenshots (reduced to 256 color png for posting, with the resulting color data loss, so colors aren't quite true to what I actually see, but it's enough to get the idea): PAN 0.93 (28.7 KByte, 712x703 px) http://members.cox.net/pu61ic.1inux.dunc4n/pix/screenshots/pan93.png PAN 0.14.2.91 (34.0 KByte, 820x729 px) http://members.cox.net/pu61ic.1inux.dunc4n/pix/screenshots/pan14.png As you can see it's similar colors (save for the URL), but the ones I've chosen in 0.14.x are enough lighter that they are actually readable against the background. The concept should be familiar to anyone who has a dark background set by default in their browser preferences. Far too many sites simply assume a white background in the browser, and specifically set text/foreground color to something dark with that assumption in mind, therefore /not/ specifically setting background. That sort of site ends up unreadable, with say a (site set) dark blue text on a (browser default) black background. A cardinal rule of site design, therefore, stressed by the good site design texts/courses/sites, is to never make such assumptions: If you specifically set foreground/text color, specifically set background as well; if you specifically set background, set foreground/text too. The problem as it applies to PAN is that the my GTK theme specifies a darkish (military blue-green, dark cyan, cadet blue, etc) background, with an off-white foreground/text. Absolutely wonderful as far as it goes! Then PAN comes along and sets quote colors. Wrongly assuming a light background, it therefore sets relatively dark quote/sig colors. While new material is the very readable theme-set off-white on dark cyan, first level quotes are an almost invisible dark purple-magenta on dark cyan. Second level quotes are somewhat more visible but not comfortably so, red on dark cyan. Sigs are somewhat visible as well, mid-green on dark cyan. Question: What if the theme had that same purple as the background color? (No I can't imagine wanting to look at that much purple/dark-magenta either, but someone might.) First level quotes would be /entirely/ invisible! With a bit of thought, it's quite apparent that one simply cannot hard-code foreground/text colors, unless one hard-codes background colors as well. Doing so /will/ cause problems for /some/ portion of the user-base. While there are a number of less than optimal solutions (use only the theme supplied text color for everything, hard coding both foreground and background colors, telling those with "bad" theme choices to get with the program), the most direct and obvious solution is to simply let the user specify the color preferences themselves. If the defaults don't work with their color-scheme, they can choose other colors that /do/ work. Problem solved! -- Duncan - List replies preferred. No HTML msgs. "Every nonfree program has a lord, a master -- and if you use the program, he is your master." Richard Stallman in http://www.linuxdevcenter.com/pub/a/linux/2004/12/22/rms_interview.html _______________________________________________ Pan-users mailing list Pan-users@nongnu.org http://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/pan-users
