Selected pull-down menu items obscured (Windows Classic)

[Lee Allen]

Windows version. Selected items in the main pull-down menu are obscured by the highlight-bar. The text is black against a very dark blue background. Either the text color needs to be toggled to white or the bar needs to be lightened considerably.

[Lee Allen (n-admin18)]

Probably low priority but annoying for a new user.

[su_v (suv-lp)]

Text foreground color in selected menu items seems to be a recurring themeing issue with GTK+ on Windows:
- Bug #168634: Selected menu item whites out
- Bug #168694: Selected menu item displays as blank under Win Vista
- Bug #168940: white Menu entries on vista
- Bug #168956: Menu Items Disappear on Rollover
- Bug #169041: Highlight menu goes blank
- Bug #169042: Drop-down list highlight disappeared on Vista
- Bug #630468: Menu bar items go white when mouse over
- Bug #666377: selected menu-text no visible
- Bug #681228: Win7 Menu Text is white when on hover

Apparently all fixed in the past by updating the GTK+ stack used with the Windows packages.

[Alvin Penner (apenner)]

- not reproduced on Windows 7, Inkscape 0.48.5. I get a light background highlight with dark text.
- not reproduced on Windows XP, recent development version. I get a very dark background highlight with white text.

you may need to investigate your color scheme to see if it can be modified in Windows. Unfortunately I don't know how to do that, I use just the default.

[su_v (suv-lp)]

Related upstream bug reports:
* 660303 – Custom Windows 7 themes, GTK menu fonts are always black.
  https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=660303
* 686026 – Enabled menu items need to have foreground inverted when selected
  https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=686026

Same reports for other ported GTK+ app (GIMP):
* 739212 – Gimp menu items when highlighted
  https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=739212

[Brynn (brynn4inks-deactivatedaccount)]

For my experience, this is affecting Win7, when the Windows Classic style is chosen from the Personalization dialog. I had been using the Aero style, for a few years, until I recently figured out how to change it back to an XP style display. The problem does not occur when using any of the Aero style displays (which I think is the default). Only after I switched it to the Classic style, did the problem occur.

I'm using Win7, 64-bit and Inkscape 0.91, 64-bit.

From this topic in InkscapeForum, it doesn't seem to affect XP. http://www.inkscapeforum.com/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=18342

[su_v (suv-lp)]

Reproduced with 64bit Inkscape 0.91 (MSI installer) on Windows 7, using 'Windows Classic' as desktop theme.

AFAIU this is an upstream bug in the toolkit's theming for Windows, not specific to Inkscape, or to Inkscape's packaging for Windows. There are screenshots of GIMP showing the exact same effect (text labels of “highlighted” menu items uses same foreground text color as when not highlighted).

[jmeidal (jmeidal)]

I can confirm a menu text issue in Inkscape Inkscape 0.91 r13725 on Win10 x64.

1. Open any top menu, navigate by hovering DOWN through menus items
2. When hovering over a standard menu item DIRECTLY BELOW an expanded menu item the background hover color (blue) does not include the text
3. When navigating UP through the menus the same menu item does have a background issue
4. When hovering over an expandable menu quickly the background hover state take a moment to resolve, then is fine
5. All other backgrounds work fine when hovering over for me

See attached screenshot of what appears in Step 2

[Cristian Secară (secarica)]

I can confirm this problem still exist in Win7 (Windows Classic style) for Inkscape 0.92, GIMP 2.8.20, Claws Mail 3.15.0. However, this does not happen with Sylpheed (latest versions in general), which is an e-mail client also built on top of GTK 2 port for Windows (http://sylpheed.sraoss.jp/en/), where all selected menus have white text on dark blue background.

Any clue what might be different there to succeed ? The "MS-Windows" gtkrc in /share/themes is practically the same as for others listed.

In Inkscape (for example), by deleting these lines from MS-Windows gtkrc theme

  engine "wimp"
  {
  }

the menu becomes Tango style, which is not the same as changing only the ink color in menus.

Cristi