Created attachment 59651 [details] Desktop with black background and barely readable text. Version: unspecified (using KDE 4.6.2) OS: Linux I know this is not a single bug / task, but please help me to find the several components involved and I'll file separate reports. I'll use this as a meta-bug. Text in KDE can get really unreadable by using dark background. And happens even if you just have a fullscreen Konsole opened, for example. What's the problem? Text has no background (as tooltips have instead) in several places, so text easily becomes unreadable. Examples: - solid color black background and weather plasmoid -> text difficult to read (no blur / transparency involved); - solid color black background and KickOff opened -> some text barely readable; - Konsole opened and Amarok song notification (KNotify) -> text unreadable; - same for taskbar text, and so on... Solution? I don't know what could be the best solution, but something like tooltip with white text background should be studied... Reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: Black background / Konsole maximized, blur / transparency on. Actual Results: Text barely readable. Expected Results: Text always clearly readable.
Reassigning to Plasma. They deal with the theme.
Came to report this problem for plasma-weather applet. Perhaps related to Bug 261967 Is this something that needs to be reported (and fixed) in each separate plasma widget that has a problem? Or is it a problem with the theme itself?
If a theme is highly transparent, it effectively won't use a foreground/background color combination, but only a foreground color. In that case, the same as for Plasma tooltips should be done, i.e. a "text shadow" using a color that contrasts well with the text color.
I also have a bug report on this, along with a proposed fix: KDE bug 278861 It doesn't look like anything is happening with this, so far. You can try using the Frosty Air theme instead, which I have created to help with this issue (http://kde-look.org/content/show.php?content=148767).
*** Bug 278861 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
Confirmed by duplicates.
Regarding minimized taskbar items: It seems that minimized items don't just have lighter text but a lighter button outline as well. It appears as though the button graphics and text are simply being made partially transparent. I couldn't find anything in the theme configuration to indicate that this is configurable per theme, but perhaps it should be. Making minimized items more transparent seems to work okay with dark themes, but doesn't work so well with the Air theme.
Created attachment 78947 [details] Notification that's impossible to read Not sure if it's the same bug or not, but I'm seeing a similar problem with notifications: black text on dark background.
This can probably be considered closed in Plasma "Next" (KF5 based), see section "Polished Interaction": http://vizzzion.org/blog/2014/02/next-means-focus-on-the-core/ http://vizzzion.org/images/blog/plasma2/diamond.png Thanks to Marco Martin for the great work.
(In reply to comment #9) > This can probably be considered closed in Plasma "Next" (KF5 based), see > section "Polished Interaction": > http://vizzzion.org/blog/2014/02/next-means-focus-on-the-core/ > http://vizzzion.org/images/blog/plasma2/diamond.png > > Thanks to Marco Martin for the great work. See also: http://notmart.org/blog/2013/11/plasma2-all-about-elegance/
Fixed in Plasma 5.