KWin and plasma's colorscheme

[Aaron J. Seigo]

On Tuesday 05 February 2008, Matthew Woehlke wrote:
> Well, plasma obviously has it's own color scheme, though I can't say
> from an objective point if this is good or bad (probably bad, at least
> in that currently there is no config for it in the color kcm, and there
> should be). So, I'm going to go with Chani, here; they should be
> configurable*, and the colors should be configurable from the color kcm
> along with all other colors (including WM colors, though admittedly
> there is work to be done there also).

configuring the plasma colours actually makes very, very little sense since 
the whole point of them is to harmonize with the svg's.

if they were configurable, it would be neat if the colours kcm were able to 
manage different sets of colour schemes. this may be applicable to more than 
just plasma(-the-app), after all.

but the *real* issue imho is that there is a complete separation between the 
widget theme and the svg theme. it would make a lot more sense, at least to 
me, if widget themes shipped with an SVG theme that was then used by plasma, 
et al. that way the widget theme could harmonize naturally with the SVG 
theme.

it's also pretty annoying usability-wise to have to go to N places to set N 
themes up.

i haven't really addressed this issue yet since we still have really sat down 
and clearly defined precisely what should and shouldn't be in the svg theme, 
etc. ok, we do have a techbase page, but it needs some serious consideration.

likewise, the colour scheme should come with the widget style. applying random 
colour schemes to widget styles is not in line with reality. for super 
flexible styles, they could advertise themselves as accepting any colour 
scheme, of course.

with that in place, then it might be possible to talk about how to do 
colourization of svg's since it would then be under control / moderation of 
the artists. and that, really, is the heart of the issue here.

you can't just go around colourizing svg's up without limiting what is 
possible colour wise. you can tint greyscaled svg's, but that's a very blunt 
instrument. you can colorize based on intensity or what-not (i remember 
reading a paper on these sorts of algorithms some time ago, but none of the 
details =/ ) and those are better, but nothing will approach color-for-color 
literals in the svg's themselves without limiting oneself to a small (and 
often uninteresting) subset of possibilities.

> * The oxygen cursor theme achieves configurability by using "magic"
> colors that are replaced with system colors. If plasma is using QtSvg
> (i.e. rendering done at a stage that can respond to the system color
> scheme), this should be easy enough to implement.

well, there are two differences here:

a) you have a set theme; the theme isn't changing out from under you
b) a set of cursors are a bit simpler of an animal to tame than the various 
svg's we support in Plasma::Theme

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

KDE core developer sponsored by Trolltech
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