Color, Icon and Font Settings in KDE4

[Matthew Woehlke]

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

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Ok, I don't think we should have numbered background roles as on page 3. 
IMO the background roles should be:

Workspace (currently known as "standard")
Selected
Window
Button
Tooltip

For cases where a special background color is wanted, we can do two 
things; invert the foreground and background (this means only one text 
color may be used), or use blending to maintain legibility while 
creating new colors. Specifically, the only use-case I know of for using 
a non-standard background is the address bar when at a secure website.

'List alternate background' is a specific background color that is 
defined as being legible vs. the same foreground color set as 
'workspace'; we do not need a new color role for it.

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There are a couple ways to handle focus indication. One is to define a 
tinting system that is 'foreground-safe' (i.e. will not make any 
foreground colors unreadable against the constructed background color). 
This might be done simply by having the user specify a color and 
requiring that if a color which makes any resulting combinations of 
background/foreground unreadable, that is considered a bad color choice 
(e.g. if someone specifically picks the same colors for background and 
foreground I don't think it is our job to prevent that). Another way is 
to have a single 'focused' background color, or one for the first four 
"unfocused" background roles (I don't think there is such a thing as a 
focused tooltip, right?). I would prefer the first option since it gives 
the style flexibility to not use the focus color at 100% (see for 
instance my hacked version of Plastik in the playground).

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There is no problem API-wise with the number of colors spiraling out of 
control, if we have 8 foreground roles and 5 background roles, that is 
only 40 colors, which is pretty small. Since they are always addressed 
by pair anyway, no programming complexity is added. But to simplify 
things for the user, it should be possible to specify that all 
foreground colors for a given background role should use the set from 
the workspace background role. This way you can set as few as 8 
foreground colors (if all of them work OK against all background 
colors), and override individual pairs as needed.

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As for WM colors, there are only two foregrounds that ever need to be 
worried about, and they always go with the same set of background colors 
that do not overlap. Therefore these are wholly independent of the other 
colors and the whole 'roles' system.

Finally, I disagree with removing the 'blend' colors from the WM, it is 
far more convenient to set these in one central place, and most 
decorations should use them (unless they display a totally flat color 
for the background). In fact I would also like to see 'hover' color 
added. (We are already in agreement that a 'focused' color should be added.)

-- 
Matthew
Obscurity: +5