Hello,

I have been using the bluetube-wide theme, but have run into an issue with some of the color choices. As you can see in this image the highlighting color of the selected item is very hard to read. Black on dark blue does not provide for the best in contrast.

I have dug around in the qt.txt and the ui.xml, but have not been able to figure out where those colors are defined. I have tried to find this kind of information before and have always be stymied.

First, does anyone know where this information is defined?

Second, does anyone know of a good myth theme tutorial? The Theme Development Guide on the MythTV site does not really provide any useful information for actually creating a theme.

Thanks,

_________________
Tim

LinHES 8.4
HDHR3
BioStar A770, AMD X2 4050e, 2GB RAM
GigaByte GeForce 8400, Chaintech AV710
USB-UIRT

Try the "qtlook.txt" file in your theme directory. E.g. - /usr/share/mythtv/themes/blue/qtlook.txt or /usr/share/mythtv/themes/blootube-wide/qtlook.txt.

Hmmm, sorry that's what I meant by qt.txt. I was posting from memory. I have tried making several changes to the qtlook.txt, but nothing seems to change these colors. I have OpenGL selected as my "Paint Engine" if that makes any difference.

I'll try changing a few other entries in that file to see if I can get any colors to change.

Tim

Are you restarting the frontend after making your changes?

No, I didn't. I figured that since I didn't need to restart when making changes to the ui.xml, I didn't need to restart for this either. I'll give that a shot.

Thanks for pointing that out.

Tim

so did that work?

Well, the changes did take effect. However, I ran into the exact same problem I had the last time I tried changing the colors of any of those elements. The entire screen with those elements goes black. Even though none of the colors defined in the qtlook.txt are black, everything drawn is black.

Now, I guess I am exaggerating a little bit. For example, in the sample that I posted above, the text "Select Group Filter" is still white, and the box fram is still blue. But all of the text in the box is now black, along with the highlight bar. However, the thin white frame around the highlight bar is still white. So I can still move the highlight bar up and down and can see that movement, but none of the text is readable.

I get these results with even the smallest change. Just increasing the color hex of one value by 1 causes this change to black. I sent an e-mail to the creator of the blootube-wide theme to see if he had any pointers on how to change these colors.

I have mucked around with the UI.XML of various themes to make changes to the fonts and contents of screens without any problems. I have just never had any success with modifying the qtlook.txt file. Hopefully someone with some theming experience will chime in here with some words of wisdom.

Tim

Now this just seems strange to me. I copied the qtlook.txt from the G.A.N.T. theme, as the colors seemed ok to me. When I restarted X I saw that all of the dialog boxes now had the grey look to them (just like the G.A.N.T. theme), they just didn't have the background image. So I edited the qtlook.txt to modify the BackgroundPixmap line and pointed it to the blootube-wide background. This time when I restarted X all of the dialog boxes were completely black again. The only change I made was to the BackgroundPixmap line. I didn't change any of the defined colors.

Does anyone know how the entries in the qtlook.txt are related? Apparently there is something linking them and when anything changes the whole display gets thrown off.

Tim

How are you editing the file?

I'm really that dumb. No, I really am. I thought nothing of using WordPad to edit that since it works fine to edit the ui.xml. Well, it doesn't with the qtlook.txt. The extra LF (or is it CR, I always get that confused) that Windows editors add screws up the qtlook.txt.

Think I'll just slink back to my corner and try not to draw attention to myself.