Re: face at point

[Fredrik Staxeng]

"Eli Zaretskii" <eliz@is.elta.co.il> writes:

>> Newsgroups: gnu.emacs.help
>> From: Fredrik Staxeng <fstx+u@update.uu.se>
>> Date: 19 Nov 2002 09:54:48 +0100
>> 
>> I think default faces should use colors that, on most hardware,
>> result in high enough contrast to be easily readable by the vast
>> majority of users.
>
>I agree, of course.

I have snipped the rest, since I think that we are agrreing on most 
points. I reread the initial complaint, and what he said was

> Well...I guess in theory that should work, but my experience has been
> that a number of faces are difficult to read when you use a dark
> (black) background - in particular, there are a number of faces which
> use variants of blue (navy, darker blue etc) and red or dark red which
> are difficult to read. I found this under both X and console.

I think that you might find those faces readable on your screen, or
you have changed them to something readable. The following discussion
was partly about perception, and partly about color support on ttys.

I think you need at least one of the following, but both would be
good.

- A way to emulate tty color when on X. That is, an Emacs maintainer 
  could just do M-x color-restrict to see if his faces get mapped
  reasonably.

- That Emacs consider both foreground and background pairs, and changes
  those that has been troublesome. E.g yellow:white -> red:white.
  This should be done at the ansi color number level.

This leaves the problem of deciding what the default background is on
ttys. I have no solution to this, except to ask the user.

- I also think that it would be good to have a color picker for X,
  that lets the user select from the 6x6x6 cube, and possibly modifying
  the color. This is a much better way of selecting colors than 
  reading rgb.txt and trial and error.

The reason for using that particular cube is that it then works well
for those people who still have 8-bit displays. Well not well,
but as good as it gets.

- If one really wants to go overboard with this, you would define some
  measure of color contrast, and then provide a way to set the minimum
  required contrast. If you set it to max, you get black-and-white.


-- 
Fredrik Stax\"ang | rot13: sfgk@hcqngr.hh.fr