clim contrasting colors

• To: jmorrill@BBN.COM, clim@BBN.COM
• Subject: clim contrasting colors
• From: Scott McKay <SWM@stony-brook.scrc.symbolics.com>
• Date: Thu, 27 Aug 1992 10:52-0400
• Cc: faes-dev@BBN.COM, bugs@franz.com
• In-Reply-To: <4743.714865864@bbn.com>

    Date: Wed, 26 Aug 1992 17:51 EDT
    From: Jeff Morrill <jmorrill@BBN.COM>

    (clim 1.1, allegro 4.1)

    We recently borrowed an interior decorator to decorate our windows.
    He decided, for color screens, that the window background should
    be clim:+royal-blue+ and the window foreground should be clim:+white+.

IMHO, your interior decorator should read (or re-read) the books by
Edward Tufte (especially the parts on typographic design) and the book
called "Ogilvie on Advertising".  Both of these people make fairly clear
cases for why light letters on dark backgrounds are a typographic
mistake.  I agree with them, even though I seem to be increasingly in
the minority in this area.

    I have discovered that these two inks are identical ("white") on a B&W Sun
    OpenWindows display.  This makes it rather difficult to use the program.

Huh?  This is very odd.

    The colors are specified as the :stream-foreground and :stream-background
    :panes options to define-application-frame.  These options are evaluated
    at compile time as far as I can tell, which is obviously too early for
    me to examine the characteristics of the stream or the display and
    then select an appropriate ink.

Are medium-foreground and medium-background of the streams in question
really clim:+royal-blue+ and clim:+white+?  If they are, something bad
is happening in the decoding of inks...  I don't have a color X screen
in front of me, so I guess someone at Franz Inc will have to look at
this.

    I suppose clim:make-contrasting-inks was invented to solve this
    problem.  But it does not do as good of a job as our decorator
    in choosing snazzy colors.

It's not meant to do a snazzy job, just a "loud" job.

    Does clim 1 have a way around this problem?  

It should work.

• clim contrasting colors
• From: Jeff Morrill <jmorrill@BBN.COM>

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