Universal themes: a proposal

[François Revol]

Le Sat, 10 Apr 2010 17:35:06 +0200, Nicolas Mailhot a écrit :
> Le samedi 10 avril 2010 à 17:15 +0200, François Revol a écrit :
> 
> > Again, it makes sense for OSes that do have centralized package 
> > management...
> 
> Does not change a bit for other systems, as soon as you introduce a 
> new
> font source managed differently than others you'll get conflicts. The
> problem is not package management or not the problem is multiple 
> sources
> and handling for a generic item (fonts) that users expect to behave 
> the
> same system-wide

Yeah, well... anyway noone has written any code to it yet anyway.

> > Remember we are talking about Themes, which are supposed to be 
> > applied 
> > to the whole desktop itself (mostly) (I hate skinned apps cause the 
> > break GUI consistency, but desktop themes are not the same).
> > So the font should stay consistent, at least for the desktop it is 
> > applied to.
> 
> Text is also displayed in apps (browsers, office apps, design apps,
> whatever). Having the same font in windows decorations or widgets, 
> and
> inside app windows (which you can't rely on not happening because a 
> user
> that likes a font will set it everywhere), but behaving differently
> (because the font version is not the same or the rendering settings 
> is
> not the same), is already a common user complain, and letting themes 
> use
> fonts not taken from the system font pool and processed by the system
> font rules is going to make it worse.

Well I don't know what you mean by theme, but usually when I designate 
a font in themes it's exactly meant to become system wide.
Of course some apps have their own font settings but well, system-wide 
fonts won't apply either there.

Still, in Themes for Haiku I have a plugin system which takes what it 
can from the system data and applies to the app's own pref (if 
enabled).
For ex the Pe plugin applies the system fixed-width font to its prefs, 
ditto for the Eddit plugin, ...

cf.
http://dev.haiku-os.org/browser/haiku/trunk/3rdparty/mmu_man/themes/addons

For Linux desktops it should be possible to have an emacs plugin apply 
the font designated in the Gnome theme, ditto for an xterm plugin...

> Consistency in text is a primary user demand. They don't care if 
> letters
> are different on another system (and in fact different systems make
> wildly different rendering choices), but they demand that on the same
> screen they are rendered and placed exactly the same way if the same
> font name is selected. And they won't understand if foo font behaves 
> one
> way in the app windows (because the app uses foo at version x, the
> version installed system-wide) and another in the windows decorations
> (because the theme used embeds foo font at version y)

Well, excepting PDF readers I suppose ;)

François.