GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 86952
Dark panel colors make clock font unreadable
Last modified: 2005-01-02 15:56:35 UTC
If I set the panel's background color to black, the clock inherits this background color, causing the text to be unreadable. The clock should either refrain from inheriting the panel's background color, or do change the text's foreground color in these cases or something... maybe like nautilus does with desktop-icon text. This is related to bug76889.
Not inheriting panel color is ugly, is a bug and isn't an acceptable solution. Not obeying theme specifics for text is also not an option, for a11y reasons. I'm tempted to mark this NOTABUG and say that the correct answer is 'choose backgrounds and font colors in your theme that don't conflict', but someone else (read: mark) should confirm that judgement.
If the policy is "the user shouldn't pick a background color for the panel that is different from her gtk2 theme background color", then why even give users the option of picking a background color for the panel? I understand why the text on GTK2 widgets should be the GTK2 font color, but if we are dealing with text that lies on a background that is already configurable, then it's ok for the color of the text on that background to change as well, in order to make it readable. Case in point: the nautilus desktop text changes automatically, depending on the color of the desktop background. Gnome has already decided that changing text is ok for the desktop, since the background color can change. The panel is no different. I propose that in this case, the text's font color should *try* to match the GTK2 color -- but if that color would make the text unreadable, it should change to white or black, as necessary, to be readable. In any case, I wouldn't mark this as NOTABUG. If the clock becomes unreadable for half of the possible panel background colors, that's a bug in my book. However, I would certainly call it a minor, low priority bug since there's an easy workaround (and it's just the clock).
I can only second that. Another thing unmentioned here is that it not even comletely inherits the panels background, but an ugly thick frame remains around the clock in the gtk default background color. I can understand that giving the option of a user defined foreground color is overkill for such a small applet, but using the nautilus algo for changing the color seems like a good idea. I would argue that the one who coded the clock applet never changed his/her panel's background color, else he/she would have fixed that. Looking ugly as hell isn't a feature IMHO.
*** Bug 103288 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
*** Bug 105274 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
We're trying to find a good & general solution in bug #160944. *** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 160944 ***