GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 412982
If text color set to white, tooltips are unreadable.
Last modified: 2007-08-06 16:25:33 UTC
Please describe the problem: I recently changed my foreground colors to white and my background colors to dark (for the marginal energy savings) and everything is working pretty well EXCEPT tooltips. Tooltips listen to the text color defined by gnome-theme-manager, but have a fixed background color. Tooltips should either have a fixed text color or vary the background color based on the text color. Steps to reproduce: 1. 2. 3. Actual results: Expected results: Does this happen every time? Other information:
I get the same behavior. It's very annoying...
I confirm that problem too. Using debian/testing KDE 3.3.5 and hi contrast white on black color scheme.
*** Bug 425673 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
This problem has been fixed in our software repository. The fix will go into the next software release. Thank you for your bug report.
The current fix as the side effect to make notification bubbles less nice than before (see attached screenshot). It would be better to add a color setting for tooltips also, or follow Brian suggestion and make tooltip and notification text color a function of the background color. (And anyway, notification bubbles should be fixed to not use hardcoded colors).
Created attachment 86277 [details] Screenshot
Well, tooltip colours are now simply the standard fg/bg colours. I'm hesitant to add a symbolic colour just specifically for tooltips.
Which standard colors? Note I am using KDE, not Gnome, and my "standard" colors are correct - all KDE/Qt applications show tooltips in right colors. Maybe I can somehow explicitly configure the tooltip colors for gnome?
>tooltip colours are now simply the standard fg/bg colours Can we have a link to the usability testing report that resulted in the decision? Personally, I find usability going down after this change (it is difficult to distinguish tooltips from menus) and I would kindly like to ask to change it back to yellow.
There is no usability testing I'm afraid. It is simply a temporary solution until we find a better way to prevent tooltips becoming unreadable. I agree with you that it would be nice to have a special colour for tooltips, but this needs to be done so that they don't become illegible if the user changes the theme colours.
I think the question we should be asking ourselves is this: Are there more people changing their themes/colors? or Are there more people affected by the tooltip change? Without a study we won't know for sure, but I am inclined to believe that it's the second, because usually non-power users (not the minority) don't change the defaults.
I wouldn't mind if tooltips were completely unthemable, that is, if the text color didn't change either. The thing is, every time you define a background color, you need to define a foreground color to go with it, otherwise something bad can happen. So, yellow tooltips with black text will be fine, as long as it stays that way.
As Brian Kerrick Nickel said in comment #12. Just keep the yellow background and black text for now. They're fine the way they are. Just make the black text static and unchangable through themes.
I have a feeling we will get just as may complaints if the colours are fixed.
I prefer they are fixed than unreadable. Unless someone educates me how to theme them while using KDE, because I could not find it out. Note that the tooltips are not legible for me only if I check "apply colors to non KDE applications" in the KDE's Control Center, which is what I need to avoid shocks for my eyes.
All issues should be fixed in the next GNOME version, where a new tooltip colour option will hopefully be available.
The situation has evolved a bit, since there's tooltip color settings now in the appearance dialog. But clearlooks doesn't seem to honor these settings.
That's probably because I only added that feature two days ago. The themes now need updating to use the tooltip_bg_colour and tooltip_fg_colour symbols.
Is the appearance dialog able to know if the current theme use the colour settings. If so, it would be neat if the pickers of unused colors could be made insensitive.
@Thos: so this should be marked to fixed?
Andrea, as soon as Clearlooks is using the new symbolic colours then I would consider this bug closed. Emmanuel, please file a bug against the appearance control panel applet about disabling colours which the theme will not use. I have been planning on implementing this but haven't got round to it yet.
Marking as fixed. Me and andreasn need to think about the colors, as we prefer the blue and not the yellow/orange