[Libreoffice-ux-advise] Calc's tab colors and GTK tabs

[Jan Holesovsky]

Hi Ruslan,

Thanks so much for working on this!  I'm cc'ing the UX-advise guys, I am
sure they'll be able to create a mockup for the generic tab look in
Calc.  IIRC, they even proposed a different ordering of the tabs and the
buttons to move them, but I am not exactly sure if it is documented
somewhere.

UX people - please see the details below :-)  It is about the tabs that
are in bottom left part of the Calc window to switch sheets; Ruslan made
them to render natively (ie. uses the Gtk+ theme to render them), but
unfortunately this does not allow their coloring.

On 2012-07-12 at 18:35 +0400, Ruslan Kabatsayev wrote:

> It seems there's no easy way for this. Some themes, e.g. QtCurve and
> oxygen-gtk, don't have special color inside tabs (like Clearlooks or
> Glossy have), and all we can do with them is rendering the colored
> background and then the tabs, so we'll get ugly squares under tabs
> (and I'm not sure if QtCurve has similar "translucent" tabs with
> respect to background as oxygen-gtk).
> 
> One way around this might be to render translucent rounded rectangle
> fading to its borders under the text, but I guess this would look ugly
> for most themes.
> 
> So, maybe it was a bad idea to render tabs in native way at all. Maybe
> we should just try to develop a generic tab look, which wouldn't look
> as prehistoric as old ones did, and not follow native style (native
> styles already don't have trapezoid shaped tabs)?
> 
> > Do you think this regression would be something you could take care of, should someone else tackle this?
> I think I'll take care of it as soon as I have some ideas on how to do
> this best. I'd like to hear from someone else what they think.

All the best,
Kendy