[Pan-users] Re: What Color Prefs Would You Use?

[Duncan]

Charles Kerr posted <address@hidden>, 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