lightning's task-list picks wrong colors from gtk-theme

[Simon Steinbeiß]

when using lightning with a dark gtk-theme (such as Ubuntu's Ambiance or Xubuntu Natty's Greybird) the text in the task-list treeview of normal items is white on white.

in a practical example: if you add a few tasks to the list, only the currently selected task will be readable (for some reason fg[SELECTED] and bg[SELECTED] are picked up correctly), the others will be white on white.
in an older theme, Xubuntu 10.04's Albatross the font is at least seeable (but extremely low contrast), i deduct that colors are picked up, but wrongly.

would be nice if this could be fixed upstream (if it really is - as i assume - an upstream issue), i wasn't able to work around it in our theme (Greybird).

[Lionel Le Folgoc (mrpouit)]

(assigning to Chris as Simon doesn't have the permission to do it)

[Fabián Rodríguez (magicfab)]

The default ambiance theme in 10.10 has the same problem.

[Fabián Rodríguez (magicfab)]

I am not sure if this would be a lightning extension problem or Ambiance theme one.

[Fabián Rodríguez (magicfab)]

Another workaround / further details are availble here:
http://getsatisfaction.com/mozilla_messaging/topics/in_lightning_how_to_change_the_text_color_for_task_lists

[Simon Steinbeiß (ochosi)]

thanks for the workaround. i'll try to look into it to see whether this could be used somehow for fixing it.

i would guess that this is not a bug in gtk (at least not in themes) but wrong or a lack of color picking on thunderbird's side.

[b3nmore (b3nmore)]

As pointed out under http://getsatisfaction.com/mozilla_messaging/topics/in_lightning_how_to_change_the_text_color_for_task_lists respectively this problem occurs, because they choose the MenuText color for tasks in calendar-tasks-tree.css, which is for dark menu themes white (or a light color).

To fix this, one should choose e.g. WindowText as color in the sections:

.calendar-task-tree > treechildren::-moz-tree-cell-text(completed)
.calendar-task-tree > treechildren::-moz-tree-cell-text(future)

of calendar-tasks-tree.css.

[Simon Steinbeiß (ochosi)]

ok, i'll try to have another look at fixing this in the theme. i think shipping our own calender-tasks-tree.css for thunderbird is a bit overkill (and would additionally potentially break other themes in this respect).

[b3nmore (b3nmore)]

Simon, don't bother fixing this in the theme. Thunderbird does the right thing here. It chooses the system menu color (have a look under System Colors in https://developer.mozilla.org/en/CSS/color_value) as defined in task-tree.css, which is in our case white.
So you can either switch the theme menu color to a dark color (which isn't a real option since we use dark menu backgrounds) or you can make Thunderbird to choose another color for displaying tasks.

I agree that shipping our own task-tree.css is an overkill. Maybe one can override those values with the correct entries in userchrome.css or usercontent.css. Otherwise it has to be fixed upstream.

[b3nmore (b3nmore)]

Just want to mention, that this issue is fixed in lightning 1.0b4, which is available in the thunderbird-stable ppa (together with thunderbird 5).

They actually changed from MenuText to WindowText in the critical sections.

[Simon Steinbeiß (ochosi)]

can anyone else confirm this? if so, would be great to know so that the bug can be marked as fixed.