Re: Recolorable themes

["Thomas Wood" <thos gnome org>]

On Thu, January 5, 2006 1:10 pm, Matthias Clasen said:
> 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.

OK, I had the wrong end of the stick here.

I think we need at least 4 symbolic colours - a foreground and background
for both normal and 'entry' widgets. I think most colours could then be
computed from these (for example, the prelight colour is usually just a
lighter version of the normal background colour).

[ ... ]

>> > - 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"

Would it be possible for themes to be able to suggest alternate named
schemes?

-Thomas