Color, Icon and Font Settings in KDE4

[Aaron J. Seigo]

On Saturday 31 March 2007, Olaf Schmidt wrote:
> 1. The handling of colours, icons and fonts in KDE can be much improved.
> You can find a description of useful changes here:
> http://amen-online.de/%7Eolafschmidt/colors/colors.pdf

some comments/questions:

- why number the colours when there are semantics to them? in the table on 
page 4 (table numbers would be nice =) the numbered colours are given 
contexts in which they should be used. as a side note, i'd also 
recommend "Secure" versus "Encrypted" 

- it would be useful to provide some guidelines as to when to use the 
different content color sets; i see normal vs selected matrixed with link 
read/unread making up for the first 7 entries; how do the rest map? or do the 
numbers mean the same thing, e.g. Background 2, color 4 is for "New item in 
an unread context"?

- the easiest way to make "Strict Mode" work for colours scheme imho is to 
centralize all colour and background image API so that this can be implement 
centrally rather than in each application. apps that don't use the colour 
scheme system provided would then be considered automatically "buggy"

useful helper functions:

- what variations would be need to be calculated, specifically?
- we already have code for colorizing an image in kde3; specifically, in 
kicker. we use it for the menu sidebar.
- contrast between a colour and a background image is probably pretty hard to 
impossible? if you have a background image that is a mix of white and black 
squares, then white text will be invisible part of the time, black text part 
of the time, etc.. i suppose we could do a heuristic guess but without 
knowing positioning of the colour on the image it won't be perfect?
- what sort of "new foreground colours" in addition to the color scheme would 
be necessary? it's not very difficult to just spin around the colour wheel 
staying within a certain contrast area, but knowing what the purpose of this 
would be useful
- what is meant by "making the rendering of selected icons an icon effect like 
for disabled icons"? we already have icon effects specifically for this, and 
i started sketching in an API that does things like split the 
current "Active" into "HoveredState" and "SelectedState" so there is more 
fine grained control over this. but i'm not sure exactly what is meant there?

as for the new widgets, i think those would make very nice additions to kde 
4.1. i don't see it happening for 4.0 unless someone new steps up. we've got 
so much else to do right now.

icons: you note that some icon sizes can not be changed. which do you have in 
mind? i've already looked at adding support in KIcon for button, dialog, and 
file manager icons; menu icons are defined by the style, though kde-aware 
styles could adjust to a kde setting that we pop into qsettings/xsettings 
perhaps.

can you be more specific about this one: "The rendering for selected icons 
does not work well with the monochrome icon theme and high contrast color 
schemes."

i'm sure i'll come up with more as i spend more time with the document and the 
current APIs, but it's a start ;)

-- 
Aaron J. Seigo
humru othro a kohnu se
GPG Fingerprint: 8B8B 2209 0C6F 7C47 B1EA  EE75 D6B7 2EB1 A7F1 DB43

Full time KDE developer sponsored by Trolltech (http://www.trolltech.com)
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 189 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <http://mail.kde.org/pipermail/kde-core-devel/attachments/20070402/7ff8a4de/attachment.sig>