Re: Recolorable themes

["Thomas Wood" <thos gnome org>]

On Wed, December 14, 2005 2:02 pm, Matthias Clasen wrote:
> Hi,
>
> Jonathan recently blogged about the new symbolic color stuff that will
> appear in GTK+ 2.10. He gave a pretty good description of the features.
>
> It would be great if some people would start experimenting a bit with
> this, to see if what we have now is good enough for doing recolorable
> themes and a color capplet.
>
> The two main open questions on this are (for me, at least):
>
> - What is a reasonable set of symbolic colors that we need ?
>   I would imagine a color capplet would only allow to tweak this
>   small, fixed set of symbolic colors (and maybe offer an advanced
>   tab to tweak arbitrary extra colors).

I assume that a set of symbolic colours would consist of the colour
palette from the GNOME HIG[1], or even perhaps the new Tango palette[2].

[1] http://developer.gnome.org/projects/gup/hig/2.0/design.html#Palette
[2] http://tango-project.org/Tango_Icon_Theme_Guidelines

The tango palette has 27 different colours, where as the GNOME palette has
32, so it may be more useful to use the GNOME palette. Would it be
possible for the set to be defined in a system file somewhere? This would
allow ISVs the ability to set up the palette to meet their own branding
needs.

>
> - Do we need a way to set defaults for symbolic colors ?
>   This may not be necessary for the "standard" colors mentioned in
>   the first question, since themes could rely on their presence, but
>   it would be a good idea for any random extra colors which
>   themes might want to expose.

This could be useful, especially if the default colours for the theme were
not in the set of symbollic colours (which they probably would not be).

A nice idea would be to have the ability to define one or two alternative
sets of colours for a theme, so that a user could either create his own
colour scheme, or pick from one or two the artist has defined.

>
> If you want to play with this, you'll need to build GTK+ HEAD.
> If you want to experiment with the setting, you will need the
> current cvs control-center, and manually add the key
> /desktop/gnome/interface/gtk_color_scheme in gconf-editor. The
> value must be a multiline string with lines of the form
> name: color, e.g
>
> background: Red
> foreground: #33221f
>
> (Since GtkEntry is not very good at multiline editing, the easiest way
> to achieve this is to paste the right value into the cell...)
>
> Matthias

I assume GNOME 2.14 is still going to be released with GTK+ 2.8, so these
features will not appear until at 2.16?

-Thomas