Comments on: Overengineering beyond all reasonable limits: automatic color palette optimization

By: Mike Silva

Mike Silva — Fri, 06 Apr 2007 02:40:02 +0000

I’ve been looking for this to force black (or dark) background in my web surfing…
Is it simple to implement a Firefox plugin to re-arrange the coulors of webpages so I won’t have white backgrounds?…
Like described in this post:
http://www.nabble.com/May-I-sugest-a-new-Firefox-extension–t925703.html

By: lwatcdr

lwatcdr — Wed, 04 Apr 2007 21:11:36 +0000

I actually wrote function to do that in java a few years ago. I was working on an in house program and decided that I would experiment with some idiot proofing of the software. I also put in code that prevented all the title bar being dragged off screen, Widows size larger than the screens resolution, and colors being too close together. Worked pretty dang well. Maybe I will find the code and post it for you.

By: Announcing libcontrast | david’s bloggy journal!

Announcing libcontrast | david’s bloggy journal! — Fri, 30 Mar 2007 02:40:09 +0000

[…] Overengineering beyond all reasonable limits: automatic color palette optimization […]

By: Dan

Dan — Mon, 11 Dec 2006 19:46:12 +0000

Nice results! Try it in CIE L*a*b* color space: http://googlography.org/xyz.hh (RGBtoLAB and LABtoRGB at the bottom.)

By: ScottLog » Blog Archive » I can see!

ScottLog » Blog Archive » I can see! — Fri, 16 Jun 2006 06:52:05 +0000

[…] David (of xchat-gnome and fyre) wrote a cool post today on automatically optimizing colour palettes, and the first thing I thought of was “I have to show this to Paul“. […]

By: dataangel

dataangel — Fri, 16 Jun 2006 04:12:49 +0000

When I first came to linux and the best eyecandy was pseudo-transparent terminals I remember really wishing that there was some sort of “find best contrasting color” option because I was terrible at eyeballing it and changed wallpapers often.

A lot of people choose wallpapers or terminal backgrounds that have 1 distinct color so as to better match their theme (the default KDE background is blue to match Plastik for instance). So I could see this being a real boon even for images (taking the average or something similar as mentioned above).

By: Madeleine Ball

Madeleine Ball — Fri, 16 Jun 2006 01:54:55 +0000

I do think you have a very cool idea. This abstract seems to indicate that luminance is the major issue for readibility, chromatic contrasts only matter if there isn't enough luminance contrast. Even if it's a simplification of the real world, it's a very close approximation - at least, or especially, for reading text. And presumably easier to implement than oddly-shaped regions in color space (I don't really understand that idea, or how you'd choose the regions...?). In part, I mentioned it because red != green != blue in luminance. The double-cone analogy fails to recognize this, as the luminance of the saturated edge "circle" won't be a plane at the middle, but a wobbly curvy up and down thing with green closer to the "white" peak and blue closer to the "black".

By: zdzichu

zdzichu — Thu, 15 Jun 2006 20:47:22 +0000

Cool! GNOME Terminal would benefit greatly if those „smart colors” were implement in it.
As for comment with Windows XP — it draws shadow below text, which provides nice dark background for white letters. Eterm works similarly — every letter have one pixel black half-outline (to the right and below character) which greatly improves visibility, but doesn’t solve darkblue-text-on-black problem.

By: Damián Viano(Des)

Damián Viano(Des) — Thu, 15 Jun 2006 20:29:49 +0000

Really cool idea! Congrats, and keep up the good work.

I would also like to see this in a vte.

By: Ben

Ben — Thu, 15 Jun 2006 15:19:24 +0000

This sounds like a very positive direction to go in. I would love to see this in gtkhtml. I prefer dark interface themes (easier on the eyes), but a lot of HTML mail is unreadable in Evolution because it often defines the text color (black or dark) but not the background color, which it assumes will be light. At least Firefox lets me override the system themes for background color. If gtkhtml could “push” the background color to be lighter if the foreground is dark, that would be a (overengineered, sure) solution to the problem.