[ubuntu-art] Transparency

[Matthew Nuzum]

On Tue, Aug 12, 2008 at 4:16 PM, Joshua Booth <mr.booth2145 at gmail.com> wrote:
> Frankly, I don't understand people's attacks against transparency. I am so
> sick of black panels and then the white panels aren't comfortable to me. If
> they're transparent you can see right through to your comfortable wallpaper,
> and also "clear" just looks cooler to me.

One problem with transparency is the lack of contrast between text and
whatever is behind the text (and therefore showing through).

So if you choose black text and someone has a black wallpaper the text
will be unreadable. If you choose light colored text and someone has a
light background its also unreadable. Whatever color text you use, if
the background behind the window is busy, say because of numerous
icons and windows, some parts of the text will be unreadable.

One solution is to do the "powerpoint" technique of having the text
duplicated, one behind the other offset by a pixel vertically and
horizontally and using a contrasting color. We've tried it and it
doesn't work well enough.

What Vista does is the only thing we can think of that works -
duplicate the text, using a contrasting color and put a heavy blur on
the background text. This produces very readable results.
Unfortunately, last time we discussed this, which was around Hardy's
UDS (last November) and it wasn't yet possible.

MacSlow said someone was working on patches to do this but I haven't
heard anything about it since then.

Its not that no one wants transparency, its just that it hasn't been
technically possible to do it in a usable way yet. I'll ping MacSlow
again to see if there's been any change.

-- 
Matthew Nuzum
newz2000 on freenode