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List:       kde-look
Subject:    Color palettes services...
From:       "Friedrich W. H. Kossebau" <Friedrich.W.H () Kossebau ! de>
Date:       2002-07-14 9:40:35
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Hi!

This is just for the record, don't have any time to code it, but in
these days where patents are given for anything I wanted to spread this
idea, maybe you even would like to discuss it :):

PROBLEM:
Often one would like to have some color settings synchronized. Think of
document creation systems where there is a central color palette given
that should be used by all documents created (following the company
style). Once in a time the head of stylists decides the red color used
should be more red (or whatever). How to spread this information,
especially to already created documents?

IDEA:
colors by references, not values

Imagine a color selection where the color palettes available are not
only static, namely files with RGB values, but also dynamic ones, like a
palette with the actual widgets colors that can be expected to change
now and then. When selecting a color there are not only returned the
actual color values, but also the id of the selected color entry (like
"palette_id/color_id").

So, next time a document is opened and the colors are about to be used
the app handling the document has to ask a color palette service daemon
for the actual values, but gets values that are uptodate. 

Palette not available anymore? Then the app has to stick with the stored
values of last update.

There even could be a runtime synchronization when the app registers
with the palettes daemon and gets informed about changes in the palette
in use. 

To prevent circular dependencies there would have to be a check, perhaps
by a color request id that is checked when executing a request whether
it originally was sent out for the actual entry. 

BTW: this idea could also be transferred to other style settings, like
paragraph style (wordprocessing, html processing share the same basic
style palette)

FOLLOW_UPS:
The presented idea origins in the wish for an automatic adjustment of
the widgets colors where I would like to set just a basic color and have
the colors of all the widgets recalculated based on that. So I could
write a "palettlet" that would do this calculations (perhaps even with a
nice, neutral gui) and write the calculated values to a palette that is
referred to in the widget colors. 

Think about automatic color adjustement of the SVG icons! IIRC SVG is in
XML so you can use information outside the file. If not, there will be
other ways to achieve this.
Automatic color adjustments of the help pages (use of dynamic html
needed of course)!

Now, that would make a really styllable desktop environment, wouldn't
it?

Back to work:
Authoring tools might gain a lot. There now can be one central place
where you can set the colors for all the documents that are already
created and in work. No need to adjust all the kword, kpresenter,
kchart, quanta, kontour and the like documents and templates, it would
be done "by magic". Hey Sean Pecor, you would be crazy about this, would
you ;)

Friedrich

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