[ubuntu-studio-devel] Agenda for 2018-05-05

[Len Ovens]

On Sun, 6 May 2018, Thomas Pfundt wrote:

> However, the most important consideration is that a majority of users 
> find dark text on bright backgrounds easier to read. A bright background 
> forces the eye to focus and makes edge recognition easier, some people 
> even have serious trouble reading bright text on dark backgrounds, 
> because they experience a glow effect, making the letters fade into each 
> other. There are some studies on this somewhere, but I'm too lazy to 
> look them up right now, they should be relatively easy to find, though.

For the most part that is correct. The one glaring exception is terminals 
that use ansi colours. No one seems to have taken the time to theme every 
ansi colour to make sure it works against the BG. So in my romp through 
available themes I would get a light theme and my terminal (I am writing 
this in a terminal running alpine) the background would go light and the 
text dark. this is fine... though the letters seem thinner to my older 
eyes and harder to read, but it is acceptable. However, I then type "ls" 
at the command prompt and am lucky if I can read half the files in the 
directory because they are all coloured by type. Ansi colour is from the 
days of CRTs when VGA was king... but is still in very high use.

The we come to graphic manipulation. For someone who is creating graphics 
colour is very important. Having a big white tool box sitting close to or 
on top of a graphic does make the colours one is using to paint with 
harder to visualize properly.

A portait studio that uses their camera teathered to their computer would 
want a mostly dark screen that does not interfere or add colour to their 
subjects.

So whatever the default theme, there needs to included alternatives to 
cover the workflows Studio includes. Someone doing publishig would 
probably agree that light bg was best. (though I think such applications 
tend to force their own theme anyway)

In any case, the theme is something that needs testing with a variety of 
applications in a variety uses (I have had some themes that make it 
impossible to enter a password in firefox)

--
Len Ovens
www.ovenwerks.net