Add beautiful background for quotes

[Джо]

Current quotations background (a simple rectangle) is absolutely ugly. Ideally it should be tailored in shape just below the quote, and may be smart enough to not appear at high-contrast color text quotes and background. Perhaps the dynamic color quotes is also able to solve this problem.

[Peter Levi (peterlevi)]

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. I prefer the understated greyish rectangle to more "complex" shapes or color options here. There exists the option to turn the background off too. Quotes being "smart" about the background might get good results, but sounds like a lot of programming effort and CPU load for the importance of it.

[Джо (joellovino)]

I know about turn off background, yes. But... As you can see in attachment, it's working bad with random wallpaper.

[Peter Levi (peterlevi)]

True. But random wallpaper + quotes background works good, as well as as static wallpaper with tailored quotes position, color and font size, with or without background. The only way to get a randomly placed quote on a random background look consistently good would be some form of partial blurrying of the background behind the quote. That does not seem to be (easily) possible with Cairo, the library we use for rendering the quote on top of the image.

If anyone is interested in digging into this and implementing it, the code for rendering the quotes is in QuotesWriter.py::write_quote_on_surface().

[Джо (joellovino)]

As long as I am a programmer (Python programmer), I can try to do some commits to implement this functionality. If I make the "core" choosing color for quotations, can I hope that you will help me with options for settings?

[Peter Levi (peterlevi)]

Not sure I understand what your plan is? On this image above basically no text color would work well at this position, as its too busy. I would not go into a direction of using "colorful" text for the quotes - because what we are after here is not just readability, but good looks too.

What might work OK is an option "Do not show quotes on busy backgrounds", or an option in "Color and size" "Avoid busy backgrounds".

What I would have done already, if it was within reasonable amount of work (and CPU usage too), is blurring of the background behind the quote (instead of using just a semi-transparent rectangle as a backdrop). But that would be hard to get with Cairo.

In any case, please keep in mind I have very little time for Variety at the moment and I consider the quote functionality fairly stable and any changes there will be low priority. Basically if I get a merge request for something complete that works really well and is worth the added code and UI complexity, I will accept it, but if I have to do work myself to get it right, I'll rather pass.