GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 316005
Add text shadows for better contrast
Last modified: 2015-12-26 12:34:45 UTC
When you use a terminal with a translucent background, it becomes difficult to read text. Eterm can draw shadow effects that improve readability a lot in this case. I think this would be useful for GNOME Terminal as well. I've written a small patch for the Xft2 backend to try this out, and made a screenshot: http://mg.pov.lt/blog/gnome-terminal-text-effects.html
Please attach screen shot and patch here. I cannot access that page at this time.
Created attachment 63659 [details] [review] Experimental patch to demonstrate drop shadows (incomplete!) I'm attaching a patch that adds drop shadows to the Xft backend.
Created attachment 63660 [details] Screenshot with the patch applied
Created attachment 63661 [details] Screenshot without the patch
Looks nice. Not sure how the performance penalty is. And of course it does have the same problem as in bug #333157.
Created attachment 81301 [details] [review] Updated dropshadow patch. Performance impact should be negligble as it defaults to off and require use of new API to turn it on. But it looks nice ;)
How is the color of the shadow set? Note that gdk has a similar effect that can be set using the embossed attribute. We should check it out.
Couldn't see how they choose the colour for the embossed text, but the technique is similar: redraw the text offset by +1,+1. The color chosen to for the drop shadow is the background colour at ~50% opacity - which is just enough for the text to stand out on a strong pixmap background. The drop shadow is ignored if the cell actually has its own bg colour defined.
Gtk+ HEAD has API to set the emboss color.
Any update?
Comment on attachment 63659 [details] [review] Experimental patch to demonstrate drop shadows (incomplete!) Setting patch status; this patch is for the XFT backend which has been removed.
Doesn't apply cleanly, and needs to be updated to actually implement this in the pangocairo backend.
Don't think this makes sense since vte-next doesn't have transparency or image backgrounds.
Closing as per comment 13.