Color, Icon and Font Settings in KDE4

[Matthew Woehlke]

Olaf Schmidt wrote:
> The feature plan contains a usability and accessibility review period that has 
> not yet started.
> 
> We nevertheless decided to forward some of the already known issues to 
> kde-core-devel earlier to make it easier to fix them before the full API 
> freeze.
> 
> 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
> 
> Qt designer mockups are also available:
> http://amen-online.de/%7Eolafschmidt/colors/designer.tar.gz
> 
> We are aware that it would be unrealistic to expect everything to be change in 
> time for KDE 4.0, but it would be nice if at least the colour scheme system 
> could be updated soon.

I still have not heard about any progress here. Is this something we are 
willing to tackle for KDE4?

I'm starting work on porting my personal KStyle, now known as Ion, to 
KDE4, which puts me in a position to look at doing an implementation of 
this.

What is needed:

- Support for additional color roles. We should provide a way to request 
foreground colors based on the background role, which is one of 
Input[1], Window, Button, Selected and Tooltip. Fortunately the painter 
should know which one of these is in use. This will be done similar to 
how we have a request for other not-in-Qt colors e.g. alternate list 
background.

- Color blending support. We already need this anyway, but to implement 
focus tinting effectively this is a MUST!

- Back-end support. Basically we should modify the QPalette seen by the 
style for things that have focus. Any suggestions on how to accomplish 
this? Fortunately this is slightly less urgent since it should be 
transparent to developers, i.e. style and application writers should not 
need to do anything special to support it, it will just magically 
happen. An alternative (perhaps even a preferable one) is to pass a flag 
specifying if the focus tinting should be used.

Since I didn't hear any better ideas or disagreement, I am going to 
assume that we should implement focus tinting by... well, tinting. And 
since there is a semantic difference between a window with focus, an 
input area with focus, a selection with focus, etc, (not to mention 
these can all be wildly different colors), I am thinking that a focus 
tint per background role is the way to go. (Tooltips don't have focus, 
so we only need four, not five.)

I'm also thinking maybe this should be on a wiki somewhere, is there a 
good place to post this?

-- 
Matthew
"Request to turn back time / And rectify my wrongs..."
   -- from "Title of the Song", DaVinci's Notebook