Colour Schemes

Documentation / Contents - Background

• Overview of the Background Panel
  • The Two Pages
  • The Buttons Along the Bottom
• Choosing a Pattern
• Choosing a Picture
  • The Picture List
  • The Preview and the Facts Line
• Placing a Picture
  • Fill (crop to fit)
  • Stretch
  • Scale (letterbox)
  • Center
  • Tile
• Colour Schemes
  • The Scheme List
  • Lock Scheme to Wallpaper
  • Make Scheme From Wallpaper
• The Canonical Panels
• Where the Settings Live
  • Adding Your Own Pictures
• Copyright Information

Colour Schemes

A colour scheme is the set of colours the whole desktop is drawn in: window backgrounds, text, the bevels on buttons, the selection colour. The scheme picker sits on the right of the Pictures page, so that the wallpaper and the colours around it can be chosen as one decision.

The Scheme List

Every installed scheme is listed by name. Select one and press Apply and the desktop redraws in it.

Schemes you have made yourself are marked in the list so you can tell them from the shipped ones.

Lock Scheme to Wallpaper

A check box under the list, on by default.

While it is locked, the scheme list is greyed but still live to look at: it selects and shows the scheme that matches whichever wallpaper you have picked. A wallpaper and its scheme share a name, one to one, so the pairing is exact rather than a guess. Press Apply and both are applied together.

Unlock it to choose a scheme independently of the wallpaper. The list becomes selectable and stays where you put it.

Locking is the setting most people want. A photograph and a scheme that was built from it get on; a photograph and an unrelated scheme often do not.

Make Scheme From Wallpaper

The button above the lock check box. It reads the selected picture and writes a new colour scheme built from it.

The scheme is not an average of the pixels. Colours are chosen by colour theory, and then corrected against the contrast rules the rest of the desktop depends on: the text has to stay readable on the background, the selection colour has to stay distinct from both, and the bevel ramp is derived from the background by a fixed law. A generated scheme that fails those tests is corrected or refused, never applied and apologised for afterwards.

What happens when you press it:

1. The picture is sampled and a scheme is written, named for the picture, so that "Lock scheme to wallpaper" will match the two afterwards. 2. The scheme list reloads and selects the new scheme. 3. The scheme is handed to the scheme daemon, which applies it.

The name inside the scheme is in title case, so "emerald-mountain" becomes "Emerald Mountain" in the list.

If the sampler cannot produce a usable scheme, nothing is written and nothing is applied. An empty or failed run is refused rather than shipped.

The Scheme Editor

This panel picks and generates schemes; it does not edit their individual colours. That is the colour scheme editor's job, and it has a book of its own. Open Help Books in the Contents pane in the help viewer and pick the colour scheme entry from the list.