Re: Recolorable themes

[Matthias Clasen <mclasen redhat com>]

On Thu, 2006-01-05 at 11:50 +0000, Thomas Wood wrote:
> 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].
> 

27 sounds is a lot. I don't know how you would write a sensible color
capplet that allows to tweak 27 colors. 

> [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.

Since GTK+ uses an XSetting for the color scheme, which will hopefully
be supported by the gnome-settings-daemon, the default value for the
color scheme will live in a gconf setting, where it can easily be
customized, e.g via a sabayon profile.

> >
> > - 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.

The "defaults" problem has actually been solved in the meantime. A theme
can now set the color scheme setting to the default values in the rc
file, and it will be overridden by the xsetting on a per-color basis:

gtk-color-scheme = "background: Red
foreground: #123456"

> 
> 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?

Yes

Matthias