Extender theming issues.

[Marco Martin]

On Thursday 09 October 2008, Rob Scheepmaker wrote:
> Hello everyone.
>
> As you might have noticed, I've added support for theming the background of
> extenderitems through a standard panelSvg svg in the desktoptheme. While
> this is certainly an improvement over not having a background at all, it's
> still not as neat as I would like it to be. Notice this mockup that
> pinheiro made:
>
> http://img223.imageshack.us/img223/3504/extenderstj5.png
>
i think if the background of externderitems is on the one of dialog can't be 
on, no matter how we can manage to align the two backgrounds, so if we want to 
have a look as in this mockup i would say:
when the formfactor of the source applet is a panel extender items paints his 
own background (and dialog doesn't paint anything)
when the extender is in the desktop don't bother to have the exact same aspect 
of the popup, so extender will have no background and only the applet will.

Cheers,
Marco Martin

> at the right bottom you'll see a lovely look for extenderitems: a standard
> applet background minus bottom border. When the extender has to appear in a
> Plasma::Dialog, this look can actually be accomplished quite easily: set
> dialogs contents margins to 0 if it displays an extender, and you're almost
> there. Since currently the extender-background.svgz is the same as the
> dialog background, extenderitems are drawn perfectly over the dialog
> background, and we even profit from dialogs handling of rounded corners.
> Another option is hide the dialog background if an extender is drawn and
> handle the masking ourself. Even that is not too difficult.
>
> The problem occurs when we would like to keep this same look when the
> extender is contained in an applet on the desktop, which is currently the
> case with the kuiserver applet. The clocks don't have this issue for
> example, since even on the desktop, it's extender is displayed in a dialog.
> The issue here is, that dialog background and the applet background are
> different svg's. Just setting the margin on the applet to 0 doesn't work
> here since the applet background svg's have shadows, and thus don't align
> properly with the extender background (not to speak about removing the
> option to combine an extender and other widgets in a layout without making
> it look very weird).
> We also can't just obey the margins as set in the panelSvg, since in that
> case we would have two borders: the standard background of the applet, and
> the background of the extenderitems within that border. We could require
> applet backgrounds to set two margins: one for extenderitems and one for
> ordinary widgets, but that would still give problems when combining the two
> in one layout, which I think should be possible.
>
> I really hope I've made the issues clear, since I discovered it can be
> quite difficult to communicate this 'visual stuff' clearly, and I'd really
> love to hear some suggestions on how to make extender theming as 
appealing
> as possible without making the codebase a mess or removing a lot of the
> flexibility it currently has.
>
> Regards,
> Rob Scheepmaker
>
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