Uwe Stöhr <uwesto...@web.de> writes:
> I don't see that LyX is so special. It uses its own colors like nearly
> every program I have installed on my Windows.
You mean word, openoffice, firefox, chrome, outlook, photoshop?
I understand that many programs like weird colors and round windows
(like the utilities written by the hardware manufacturers and makers
like dell, most of which are horrible). However I do not think that so
many mainstream programs use non standard background (since the culprit
is here after all).
For example, the Windows User Experience Guidelines say:
Developers: From code, you can determine the system font properties
(including its size) using the GetThemeFont API function. You can
determine the system colors using the GetThemeSysColor API function.
Because you can’t make any assumptions about users’ system theme
settings, you should:
Always base your font colors and backgrounds off system theme
colors. Never make your own colors based on fixed RGB (red,
green, blue) values.
Always match system text colors with their corresponding
background colors. For example, if you choose COLOR_STATICTEXT
for the text color, you must also choose COLOR_STATIC for the
background color.
Always create new fonts based on proportional-sized variations of
the system font. Given the system font metrics, you can create
bold, italic, larger, and smaller variations.
> Today I made a short survey what our students are using. Except of
> one, they use the default LyX colors and did not have ideas to improve
> the color scheme.
Are you seriously telling me that people would have changed the
background to something else if it was white?
> So I'm still not happy that the option "using system colors" is now
> the default. Many developers are currently in vacation - let's see
> what they think about this.
Agreed (with the second sentence, obviously).
> I don't understand. All collapsible insets have the reddish brown
> color as frame color. What is wrong with that?
It is the same as the reddish brown of ERT, right? What do we want to
convey through that?
I am not sure anymore that using the inset color is a good idea to be
frank. What about using the same grey as the buttons backgrounds?
> But I fully agree that the caption frame should by default have the
> same color than the collapsible inset frames. OK that I change this
> accordingly?
Yes, and please remove the corresponding color.
> What else do you think we should change?
I think it would be nice to look at the list of colors and thinks about
the ones that can be removed (math macros consume a lot of them, for
example). Conveying an UI through colors is known to be a bad idea (cf
color-blind users).
Once we have less colors, it may become easier to understand how to make
them more beautiful.
JMarc
