GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 747510
Add composer option "Inherit theme colors in HTML mode"
Last modified: 2017-04-28 15:04:57 UTC
On a Lenovo X1 with 2560x1440 screen using it in native mode (1 dot per pixel), Fedora Rawhide fully up to date, I have the font scaling set to 1.5 using GNOME Tweak Tool. Everything else in Evolution is rendering the fonts at the desired size. Evolution composer headers are also, but the body is unscaled and so the characters are very, very small. I know of no way that I can tinker the font size. I am not sure what specific data to provide just now, so if I need to provide something let me know and I can oblige. I also note that the editor does not obey the GNOME Dark Theme as everything else does, it renders black on white rather than white on grey as per the theme. But I guess this should be a separate report?
Thanks for a bug report. The font settings is a WebKitGTK+ issue, please see this bug report [1] for more information. The 3.16.0 uses WebKitGTK+ for both message preview and message composer, which explains the change. Composer headers are pure GTK+ widgets, thus they follow the setting. You should have consistent misbehaviour between the composer body and the message preview with respect of the font settings. The thing about dark theme is harder in a meaning that the HTML messages might be treated differently than the Plain Text messages. The HTML "template" defaults to white body and black text. This setting is used on the receiver side too and I do not think you want to send HTML messages with a dark background and white text only because you have it set in your current desktop environment. Such dark setting might look awkward on the receiver side whom has set light theme. The plain text is different, it doesn't contain any information about background color and text color, thus I'd say we can inherit the settings from the current theme. Tomas, please correct me if I'm wrong. Either we can switch this bug report into the "Use theme settings in Plain Text composer", or close it and open a new bug report, which might not add much information on its own, thus the switch seems easier/better from my point of view. [1] https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=82889
We had a chat with Tomas and decided to switch this bug report into the option to inherit theme colors in the HTML mode. The problem is that the old GtkHTML used theme colors in both the Plain Text mode and the HTML mode on the sender's side, but the theme colors were not set in the sent HTML message, thus the receiver showed it with its default colors, which might be a white background and a black font. As you can see, this can lead to a misbehavior on the receiver's side, because when the sender, seeing a black background, sets a white text color, the receiver will not see that text, because it'll use (also) white background for that white text. That's a general issue of the HTML message formatting. Thus the proposal is to add a composer option "Inherit theme colors in HTML mode", which will be off by default, which means the same behavior with the old GtkHTML editor (user will use dark theme, but the sent message will not overwrite background and text colors). When it'll be on, then the theme colors will be sent too, thus the receiver will get exactly the same colors as the sender sees in the editor (thus truly WYSIWYG editor). Due to the string/UI freeze on the 3.16 branch, the 3.16 will contain the change without the option, the code will always work as the new option would be off. As part of this change the composer will use theme colors for both the HTML mode and the Plain Text mode (on the senders side, in UI).
Fixed with following commits: commit 59e3bb02476098c46ec4f54e45833f259910749c in the master branch for Evolution 3.17.1+. commit e1fe8e2fccdb5429b5569edf5fc15ae404d8200c in the gnome-3-16 branch for Evolution 3.16.2+.
I have to say I disagree (theoretically) with the presence of this "Inherit theme colors in HTML mode" option. I can't think of a case where someone actively _wants_ the theme colors to be inherited in the mail being composed (and the original reporter did not ask for that specifically). Even when using a dark theme, I would expect Evolution to render HTML mail contents in black-on-white like a normal document (you don't see LibreOffice inverting the colors, for example) "when composing in HTML mode". For plaintext emails, rendering using the GTK theme's foreground and background colors is fine because the resulting message won't have colors anyway. I understand the rationale behind all this, I just don't think "let's add an option for it" is useful, I don't think anybody who isn't lurking bugzilla reports would understand what it actually does when looking at the Preferences dialog. It's an option that nobody will end up using, so you have one more code path complexifying your test matrix for no gain to users (vs just forcing the composer to ignore theme colors when editing in HTML mode).