GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 726964
With default calendar colors, text is unreadable
Last modified: 2019-10-10 14:02:03 UTC
Created attachment 272772 [details] screenshot I'm running California on Ubuntu 14.04 with the default Ambiance theme. In this environment, the background in California is white and the default color for each calendar is also close to white, so the text is pretty much unreadable. See attached screenshot.
(To be more exact, the background is light gray, not really white.)
Evolution solves this by placing every event, whether a timed event or all day, in a colored bubble. I don't like this, I feel it clutters the display way too much. I'm okay with using color bars for all day events (bug #725778) but I was hoping to keep timed events as they are in master today. Perhaps a darker background color would work here, or detecting a runtime if the text color is too light and darkening it slightly.
Same problem on Debian testing, Gnome 3.8, Adwaita theme. I switched to the dark theme, which is readable.
I agree with Jim on "time-specific events shouldn't be in a bubble like all-day events". Jim, I have no idea if this is using CSS or not, but if so just add a text dropshadow/border to enforce contrast? See also: bug #732182 for another color issue.
Currently, no, the cells in the month and week view are calling Pango directly. A drop shadow might do the trick. I'm not real keen on putting a border around each block of text. Again, that sounds cluttering.
I had this problem too with California 0.4.0-2.1 but I found a workaround. Just change the color of the calendars. For example I use the red color (#ff0000) for the Birthdays and Anniversaries calendar and the black color (#000000) for the Personal calendar. Previous colors were too light.
I forgot to say that I use the default light Adwaita theme with GNOME 3.16 on a Parabola GNU/Linux-libre system.
California is not under active development anymore and saw its last non-cosmetic code changes in March 2016: https://gitlab.gnome.org/Archive/california/commits/master Its codebase has been archived in https://gitlab.gnome.org/Archive/california/issues/1 Closing this report as WONTFIX as part of GNOME Housekeeping to reflect reality. Please feel free to reopen this ticket if anyone takes the responsibility for active development again. You may want to use `gnome-calendar`.