Light-on-dark color sets and gtk+ [was Re: style->black and style->white]

[Bill Haneman <bill haneman sun com>]

On Tue, 2002-11-12 at 16:56, Owen Taylor wrote:
> 
> Bill Haneman <bill haneman sun com> writes:
> 
> > If you run one of the "inverse" themes (i.e. HighContrastInverse or
> > HighContrastLargePrintInverse) from gnome-themes, you will notice that
> > readability is negatively affected 
...
> > especially
> > troublesome with things like drop-down menus, button borders, WM borders...
> If you want good quality High Contrast themes, there is no 
> alternative to providing a theme engine. 

This isn't just about high-contrast themes, it concerns any theme that
has dark backgrounds and light foregrounds.

A theme that inverts the meaning of "black" and "white" may well be
pathological, but a theme with light foreground/dark background is not. 
It is perfectly reasonable to ask a theme engine (including the default
one) to handle this case well.

> Yeah, we could make GTK+ look just like Motif-1.2. I'm sure that would
> be _real_ popular :-). 

Despite what you may think, I am not offering to make GTK+ uglier ;-),
nor am I proposing to do something that would change the way the default
theme/RC-file combination looks.  But I am offering to patch the default
engine to make it look better with light-on-dark color sets.

Fixing tbe assumptions about outline and bevel colors would make gtk+'s
default engine work better with non-pathological RC files.  I agree that
high-contrast themes can benefit from a special-purpose engine, but one
shouldn't need a new engine just to handle dark backgrounds.

regards,

Bill
 
> Regards,
>                                         Owen
>