Tabs in 360.0

[Arnold]

Thank you for the setting to disable the "animated underline-effect" for selected tabs. The inactive tabs still blend together here as there is no "daylight" between them. The attached screen shot delineates the tabs much better than in my "real life" viewing. Maybe because of my laptop monitor. Is it possible for a little spacing be added?

2022-04-06 08_38_21-2022-ncaa-bracket-for-march-madness - PDF-XChange Editor.png (2.89 KiB) Viewed 2659 times

2022-04-06 08_38_59-2022-ncaa-bracket-for-march-madness - PDF-XChange Editor.png (2.65 KiB) Viewed 2659 times

[TrackerSupp-Daniel]

Hello, Arnold

Most people are asking for things to be made more compact, not less, but I can pass the idea along for you certainly. That said, as per usual, I cannot promise implementation at the moment.

Kind regards,

[Vasyl-Tracker Dev Team]

Hi Arnold.

- how about these bullets to 'catch the eye' ?

[Arnold]

I hope not to have to change file names. I have links set up to them from everywhere.

Wow those underlined tabs are still not "easy" on the eyes

[Vasyl-Tracker Dev Team]

Such proposed bullets are not text characters, not part of the text of the tab. Just an additional graphic element...
It can be an option to show/hide such bullets for document tabs.

[Arnold]

By using the White theme and increasing the brightness setting of my laptop I can eliminate the problem. Hooray! However, I then have white scroll bars which get lost when I am working with 24" x 36" architectural drawings. I wrote about this when the new UI was first introduced.

The Default theme does give the scroll bars a bit of color, but is darker and does not work as well. The colorless scroll bars of the White theme seem sort of disconnected from the rest of the UI on my monitor.

Is there a way to give the scroll bars a little bit of color without having to darken the White theme default Face color?

Thank you for taking the time to look into this.

[TrackerSupp-Daniel]

Hello, Arnold

I am glad that you were able to find a temporary solution. I think that Vasyl was asking if you think that offering an option to place "bullet points" inside the tabs (not changing the document name in any way) would be a good way to help distinguish the start of each tab. Can you confirm if that looks like an elegant enough solution in your eyes? I personally like it, as it definitely helps to clarify each tab, and space apart the names a bit more obviously.

As for your question about coloring the scrollbars. Currently there is no way to do so, but perhaps we can consider it as an option in the future.

Kind regards,

[Arnold]

I understood what he was suggesting, and I think it would be good feature to have in the program. My problem was two fold because of how dark the tabs were. Not only was it hard to see the lines between the tabs, it was hard to even see the tab names. So using the White theme and upping the brightness of my monitor helped quite a bit. It is workable now.

The White theme is the lightest theme. The only thing that is white are the scroll bars. The rest of the UI is a "medium" grey. The Dark Grey and Black are just unusable.

It would be nice if there was another theme that is lighter than the White theme. I have the face color set to white, and it still is grey on my monitor other than the scroll bars. Is the main part of the UI using the "White" theme actually meant to be white?

[Arnold]

I definitely don't want a white UI, but a light grey one would be nice.

[TrackerSupp-Daniel]

Hello, Arnold

Although the color selected is "White" there are textures which when applied cause a fading of the selected color (bringing it to a grey-ish tone from the selected fact color). You can disable most of the texturing and shadows that cause this effect, to get a nearly solid white version of the editor, excepting some built in textured items, like the ribbon tabs.

Beyond that, the presets are just that, presets, if you do not wish to use a solid white, but would prefer to have a lighter grey, you can most certainly create the theme as you desire. Conversely, if you want a more solid white theme, like I mentioned above you can do that by disabling some of the textures and removing shadows. (Gif attached)

Each person will have their own opinion of how best to use any software, and how it should appear. Though you claim the black theme is unusable, I could say the same about the white theme. I personally love the black theme, as I spend all day looking at my screen and have overly sensitive hearing that prevents me from turning on the lights in my office without giving myself migraines, Having a dark mode option, which is Far easier on the eyes in a darker office (especially in winter when the sunlight from the window doesn't last my entire shift), is a godsend, I try to use a dark theme for every application that it is possible to do so, to reduce eye-strain.

I can certainly understand if the default options presented do not quite fit what you wanted, ive customized my own as well, but playing with the options mentioned above, and the color pickers for each of the other color options, should let you achieve almost exactly what you want. Here is a quick "lighter grey" example that I made by modifying the default "dark grey" theme and changing the "face, window" and "background" colors to a custom "lighter grey" color:

That, paired with the bullet point idea Vasyl had above, should help greatly with differentiating between the tabs.

Kind regards,

[Arnold]

I have played with the settings quite a bit, and all I can get is medium grey. I shut off textures, etc. years ago. I will of course look through your post in the hope that I missed something. It will be a pleasant surprise if I did. His suggestion for using bullets is nice, but not effective if the lightest tab color you can set is too dark to barely read the tab name.

[Arnold]

"Out of the box" the Black interface is unusable on this computer. The theme may look fine on others. Here, it actually turns the white background in embedded windows on the drop down ribbon menus to black, thereby looking cartoonish. It would involve way more tweaking to look "good" than what has been needed with the White theme. The Dark Gray theme is marginally better. Please see the attached screen shot.

It is not a case of the options presented not fitting what I want. It is actually impossible to get what I want. There is a "Medium Gray" lower threshold for each and every color in the Face palette as concerns the tabs and main menu area. There is no such arbitrary lower threshold for the scroll bars and drop down ribbon menus. However, they are also controlled by the same Face color setting. In the case of the ribbon menus, this seems to vary somewhat based on the theme.

This is why actually setting the Face color to white still results in a medium gray color for the tabs and upper menu area. This makes it impossible to have a completely white interface even if one should so desire. This is why it is impossible for me to have light gray tabs and main menu area, without the scroll bars and ribbon menu areas being pure white. There is no escaping the medium gray lower threshold of the tabs and upper menu areas.

Unfortunately it was initially too dark on this system. I have been able to mitigate this somewhat by increasing the brightness level of the computer screen, using a darker font for the tab and main menu, etc., etc. I was already aware of every suggestion in your post. I have not had to tweak the brightness level for any other program. If time permits, I will try other colors — at their brightest setting just before turning gray — to see if they contrast better with the black text and dividing lines between the tabs.

Those incremental tweaks have resulted in an interface that works okay for me. In order to avoid tabs that are dark enough to almost obscure the text and blend together, I have to accept that the scroll bars will be white. There is no getting around it. If I increase the brightness any more it will affect other programs. The easiest way to fix this would probably be a change to lighten the medium gray threshold for all Face colors if that is possible. Decoupling the settings for the scroll bars from those of the tabs and main menu area completely might not be a good idea as far as overall appearance.

The remark I made previously about the scroll bars looking "detached" is for several reasons. First is the obvious color difference between the gray tabs and upper menu area compared to the pure white scroll bars. The second is that in windowed mode, when zoomed out, the extremely thin borders pretty much disappear on the 2 sides with the scroll bars. Finally, the vertical scroll bar "seems" to partially obscure the gold line just above it. This was better defined in the previous UI.

Thank you.

Black Theme.png (4.59 KiB) Viewed 2472 times

[Paul - Tracker Supp]

Hi Arnold,

I am not sure how many of your observations/requests around the colours are going to materialize, but I can say for sure that we will address the issue of the tiles in the palettes being hard to see when black on dark by putting a white tile behind it so that it looks as it will when placed on a white page.

RT#6026: Make tiles in dark themes use white background

I hope that helps.

[bqxmprij]

Hello, Arnold

Most people are asking for things to be made more compact, not less, but I can pass the idea along for you certainly. That said, as per usual, I cannot promise implementation at the moment.

Kind regards,

If you are keeping a tally, please count this as a vote to make things more compact. If you look at the post at Fri Apr 08, 2022 9:11 pm, the hand icon is about 3x the size of the snapshot button. In my view, its size outweighs its importance by about 3x. The smaller the buttons, the smaller the ribbon (or whatever the place in the window is called), the greater the real estate to to see the document. I would greatly appreciate an ultra compact setting.

[Arnold]

Thank you for reading through that long post and giving it some consideration. I know I am a "pain in the rear", but I do have good intentions.

The last poster expressed concern about keeping everything compact. I originally thought the Tabs needed more spacing, but it was more a background color issue than a spacing issue.

My son does computer graphics work and he explained to me that lightening the lower threshold grey of the colours in the colour pallete seems easy to me, but probably is not.

I am happy that you guys fixed the Exiting issue detailed in my other post.

Thank you.

[Paul - Tracker Supp]

Hi guys,

it may be a long post but the details are appreciated. In particular the Lead developer of the UI values the feedback. He/we may not always agree with what is suggested but we happily acknowledge that typically it is valid and more often than not it is something that we would likely have continued to miss.

So no need to apologize, we may not agree on everything but rest assured we are listening and the input is appreciated.

[Vasyl-Tracker Dev Team]

Hi Arnold.

About the "pure white scrollbar's background when face-color is white" problem. In the upcoming 361 build we tried to tweak it slightly to make it a little darker, for that case. Also in that build we solved the "RT#6026: Make tiles in dark themes use white background" issue.

Thanks for your help.

Cheers.

[Arnold]

Thank you! I will certainly try it out.

[Paul - Tracker Supp]

[Arnold]

Scroll Bars look better in 361.0.

[Tracker Supp-Stefan]

[Arnold]

The Selection and Highlight colors turn to a medium grey just like the Face colors do. The blue default Selection color was pretty dark on my screen. I was able to lighten it some, but again ran into the grey problem at the upper end.

Having the regular Selection color a little dark is not a big problem, but this color seems to be also picked up by the Search pane, the Zoom window in the View toolbar, and probably others. The screen shot with the Search Pane is with the Selection setting at pure white. The text in the Search window is pretty hard to read on my screen. The grey definitely looks lighter in the screen shot than on my screen.

This is after playing around with the screen settings and brightening it up a bit more. The desktop computer is better.

Thought you might like to see this. Thank you.

2022-04-24 14_22_28-Preferences.png (5.07 KiB) Viewed 2191 times

[TrackerSupp-Daniel]

Hello, Arnold

Glad to hear there has been some improvement for you.

Have a nice day!

[Arnold]

Thank you. Yes through trial & error I found colors that work "okay". It might be a little confusing to others if they choose one of the lighter colors in the palette. The color in the pdf's will definitely be darker than the one chosen in the palette.

2022-04-26 17_52_49-.png (14.38 KiB) Viewed 2143 times

[TrackerSupp-Daniel]

Hello, Arnold

Thank you for pointing that out. After some testing it seems to be caused by some color blending that varies with the theme in use, (in the dark theme, lighter colors work as expected, but darker colors are more faded. In the light theme, darker colors work as expected, but the lighter colors appear darker).

I have informed the Dev team of this and they are looking into what caused this change. I cannot promise a timeline for when it will be fixed, but you are correct that this is not the intent.

Kind regards,

[Arnold]

Was a ticket ever opened for this? It seems the same behaviour occurs in 363.

Thank you.

[TrackerSupp-Daniel]

Hello, Arnold

No ticket was made because a fix was implemented shortly after it was reported. I cannot seem to reproduce the problem on my end using the same methods as before, could I ask you for a Gif or Video showing the discrepancy you see on your end, so that i can bring this to the team?

Kind regards,

[Arnold]

Over here the same thing happens with highlighting as before. Have not yet tested any other color settings. As I try to lighten the highlight color it gets closer and closer to dark grey. Here are 2 screenshots I just did with the current version. Nothing seems to have changed over here. I even closed and re-opened the program after changing the color to see if that made a difference. Build 363.0, Windows 7. Perhaps I am missing something here about how the color selections work.

[TrackerSupp-Daniel]

Hello, Arnold

After some fiddling around with my settings, I have reproduced this once again... This time we will go straight to a ticket for the report:

RT#6201: Bug: Highlight colors do not match when set to color resembling face color

Hopefully we can see this resolved in time, but at least now we have a way to track its progress.

Kind regards,

[Arnold]

I think last time I had noticed it was affecting Face, Selection & Highlight color selections. I have never tried to change the Text & Window settings.

Thank you for looking into this.

[TrackerSupp-Daniel]