Much of the GNUstep interface uses colours that are dithers by default
on a depth 8 visuals when using a DPS extension or agent; the effect
is rather unpleasant visually. This is in contrast to NeXTstep, which
carefully choses solid colours.
I don't know whether we are interested in supporting 8 bit video
hardware, but in case someone wants to work on fixing that, here's
some info.
When running on an eight bit PseudoColor display, the DPS client
library allocates a gray ramp consisting of 9 shades of gray, and a
colour cube of 2x2x2. I would therefore suggest that GNUstep should
shun from using colours other than the following:
* gray values that are a multiple of 1/8;
* fully saturated red, green, blue, cyan, magenta and yellow.
This is particularly important for text (both the foreground and the
background), as dithered text is hardly legible.
There are different considerations for other types of visuals, but
fortunately non-PseudoColor low depth devices are mostly obsolete
(except perhaps StaticGray).
Regards,
Juliusz Chroboczek
