Simplified Leo Theme Outlines

[tbp1...@gmail.com]

When I put Leo on a small tablet recently, I had a hard time adjusting the theme to give a workable appearance.  Whenever I made a change, say to the font size for some UI element, some other part of the screen would not have been changed, or edges of an element would be cut off, or other problems would arise.  It was an extremely unpleasant experience.  In general, adjusting Leo themes has been hard for me.  And it's hard to know what bit of css changes what on the screen.

I came to realize that there should be an overall css selector that applied the basics to all elements.  Then any elements that should be different could be specified specifically.  I also realized that there are really only two kinds of elements - text editors like the body and the line edit widgets, and user interface elements like menus, buttons, and so on.  I include the tree in this category.  I think that all the UI elements should have the same font face and font size, so I created a new @font-size-ui and @font-family-ui logical styles.

I added a new universal selector to the top of the qt-gui-plugin-style-sheet tree.

* {
  font-family: @font-family-ui;
  font-size: @font-size-ui;
  color: @text-foreground;   
  background: @dark-base03; 
}

You would change the two colors for different theme colors.

To be more clear about the intent, I changed the logical name @font-size-base to @font-size-text for use in the body, log, and line editors where most people will want a monospaced programmers font.

Then I went through all the selectors and removed font and color specifiers unless they were intended to be different.  I also added or changed a little padding here and there.  I'm sure I didn't get as general as might be possible, so there is a bit more work that could be done.  But you can now change only the logical font families or specifiers, and the logical colors, and get your changes without having to change anything in the actual stylesheet.

Of course, if you are ambitious and want to get lots of rounded corners, color gradients, and other effects, you will have to add them yourself.  But at least these stylesheets provide a good, simple base to start from.

Oh, yes, what font did I choose for the "UI" elements?  I discussed this in a recent thread here on Groups.  For this purpose we want a font that is not monospaced, is compact and has good readability on a small computer display.  On Windows, Segoe UI, or Corbel are good, and also Open Sans, which is also on many Linux computers.  Or you can just use "sans-serif", which seems to look good on the Linux machines I've tried.

Qt components seem to be able to use font sizes to the nearest half point, like 10.5pt.

I have attached two of these simplified stylesheets, one for light and one for dark solarized colors.  Give them a try, and if you don't like solarized colors, of course, you can try some others or copy them from another stylesheet.  

[Edward K. Ream]

On Tue, Mar 29, 2022 at 11:03 AM tbp1...@gmail.com <tbp1...@gmail.com> wrote:

I came to realize that there should be an overall css selector that applied the basics to all elements. 

Excellent.  Please create a PR.

Edward

[tbp1...@gmail.com]

Git hub seems to have added them to the current outstanding PR.  I couldn't see a way to create a new one just for these new themes.

[Edward K. Ream]

On Wed, Mar 30, 2022 at 12:38 PM tbp1...@gmail.com <tbp1...@gmail.com> wrote:

Git hub seems to have added them to the current outstanding PR.  I couldn't see a way to create a new one just for these new themes.

I have just merged all your PR's into devel, which now contains the entire 6.6.1 code base.

Edward