GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 74180
Preferences box should use gtk controlable look
Last modified: 2004-12-22 21:47:04 UTC
Icons and fonts for the preferences windows tree and titles should use use icons and fonts controlable by gtk via gtkrc, like with other parts of the interface. Currently it hardcodes the icons to some files in the theme dir, and if not avaliable or pointed to a single pix image (what I was thinking as a way to remove visual clutter) shows blank squares of fixed size, so no compression of space. The font also looks too big in with my theme, wasting space and being distracting (big area on top with big bold font, vs the real controls below with small font and no bold, which should be the real point of the interface, not the title).
The font itself is the default font, we only change the font attributes. This is a perfectly valid way of designing a user interface and is even suggested by the HIG. The images help the user to identify the page he's working on and it would be a major effort to make them controllable via a gtkrc. We will not go thru the trouble of registering stock icons that are only used once in the whole application. This is just the prefs dialog, there's no need to customize it.
About the icons, the HIG also suggests to allow painting them as the user wants (including "no paint") if required by user. For some people it helps identifying things, for others it is just clutter. Do not worry, as code is now, I can get radical "no paint" for all those users (that is how appears with my rc experiments). Also, non themable means non profesional looking finish. You install a full icon set, and everything should change. But that is just a minor polish detail, I guess. I care more about the other group of users. [I guess the HIG we are talking about is the GNOME one, btw]
These are not icons, these are images that are part of the developer-controlled look of the preferences dialog. The developers chose to use them and they shouldn't be user-controllable. The images help users to distinguish between the different pages, they allow them to recognize the page on screenshots and in the on-line help even if the screenshot is showing a different translation. They also allow them to guess the page title in case the translation is not complete.
Well, I guess users can ask the doctor for a new young and perfect pair of eyes or a new nervous system, so they do not have any kind of problem with the images. That would save time with things like special icon sets... pardon, image sets, or different size support. It will make ill and old people's lifes a lot nicer, no more helping devices or glasses, not only for computers, but everywhere. :] You should check the part about accessability in the HIG docs, I dunno why GIMP should be nasty to some people, or they should stop using it when they get old (not allowed to remove red eyes from granchildren photos?). It is not about user contralable, but about user needs. A small colour splotch[*] helps nothing some old people, a simple clearer contrasted and bigger images would (plus the text, of course, which is the only solution now... so not everything lost). * "Sorry, kid, I do not see it clearly, damn screen, these things look like mixed inks, and I just want to make the previews bigger". Never heard something similar? Not even someone complaining about a hard to read text in a paper? Common. You have a point about matching online help, but I doubt matching is better than two versions of which one suits the user's eye condition. And I am not asking to be removed, but tunable as needed, you should view the images of cvs co gnome-themes, dunno why the kits could not include images for all common apps (no, the extra themes are not fancy themes, but low contrast, high contrast, big size and so on).
Please stop whining. The images are in the themes directory so there's the possibility to change them. What else do you want? If the images are not available no space is allocated for them. Just go and try it. Please stop sending these annoying bug-reports unless you also send patches or at least start to make useful themes for The GIMP. By useful I mean themes that are not only on your harddisk but available to everyone and in particular to the GIMP developers so they can test how well (or not) themeability really works.
I know that they can remove and they do not use space. That part is already working, or seems to. I know images can be changed and then recompile. Not the first time I tweak small details and build again (GIMP or other code). If that would be the case, I would not have filled a bug. I was trying to make a more general point or two, not solve a personal desire. All the text and time with this is a lot more than a shell script to locally change the icons and build, that is sure. Bug #97973 is a test of themes, and not working. Posted it also to the dev list, and the few that tested, just got the wrong one, but nobody has managed to discover why it happens, nor why it acts funny about changing sizes with GLE. Could you read it? The part about using GLE to make it work is really weird. I would like to know if I write bad gtkrcs or if I have to workaround something or it will require GTK+2.2. Then I would know how to finally keep going on with the theme, instead of blindly changing things and hoping it will look as expected.
You don't need to recompile to change the images in the prefs dialog. Just create a theme directory and put images with matching names there. The images are loaded at run-time, they are not compiled in.