And you are doing a great job! Your scientific approach is far beyond the personal opinions and including the community is highly appreciated.
For me your changes are an improvement. Thank you. I may actually become a fan of a dark background now. 
Sadly these links are evolving a little, so my old links were broken (404), but now I’ve found the new ones.
I think this should be interesting as this propose some palette that could be used, (if you have not already seen them):
http://mkweb.bcgsc.ca/colorblind/palettes.mhtml
I could see some problems only with “grayscale vision”.
Another hints that will be placed somewhere in the wiki, as many default monitor seetings are not good enough and even OS graphical stack could “worsen things”, even this aspect is usually negleted, but those who are not in need to have a “color exactness” on their monitors like some graphical peoples that need a calibrated color rendition.
Worth maybe to see:
http://www.lagom.nl/lcd-test/contrast.php
Hope it help, as I’m not colorblind I can’t express preferences.
Regards.
Carlo D.
Just looking at the screenshot rapidely, this palette looks much better aesthetically than our current one. That’s great.
I’ll need to get a deeper look at try the colors to see in more details.
Changing the default Background gradient is not a trivial change BTW. It can cause problems with the default colors used in other workbenches.
I understand, I admittedly use a very limited number of workbenches. If you can point me to any additional work benches where I should direct my efforts towards I’ll be happy to do so.
Ok, an update:
I’ve been all over the spectrum trying to figure out how to get the contrast right, without completely changing the overall color scheme/feel of the default/classic style of FreeCAD. My prior suggestion work, but pose issues against flat solids where the light washes everything out to near-white.
However, this isn’t worse than the current situation, and therefore I propose these changes move forward. In addition to that, I propose to extend the shadow used around dimension text to all sketcher lines/symbols. Here are some examples what this looks like without(this is mocked up in inkscape for visualization purposes):
with_object_noshadow.png
Here, is with the proposed mild shadow effect (visibility improves greatly):
with_object_shadow.png
Here is with the shadow but no objects (looks normal):
without_object_shadow.png
Changing the default background gradient may prove to be tricky even if the colors of all other workbenches are adapted. There was an outcry when Uwe changed the gradient not so long ago, and the change was then reverted.
Examples of color conflicts with the proposed gradient:
Part/PartDesign: Line color: #191919
Draft: Grid color: #32324b
Roy_043 I am proposing more color changes than just the gradient though as part of the visibility adjustments to try and address those problems. We discussed the potential controversy during the hackathon. I do share your concerns.
I don’t use FEM very much but you can see from the screenshot where the main issue with the results using examples\FemCalculixCantilever3D.FCStd:
FEMColorIssue.png
To the best of my knowledge no-one has been able to create a configurable color variable for the figures next to the scale bar, they are always black. Getting to the root of that would alleviate some aggravation.
Thank you for pointing this out, identifying issues early will make the changes more robust. I’ll look into it.
We probably need to switch the background too white while reviewing fem results so you can grab a screenshot of the results.
I had that issue yesterday…
I do like this approach a lot. I am a beginner of FreeCAD, and together with my colleagues I am getting up to speed.
Is there a way to export the GUI settings (especially the colors, but also other things like the location of all toolbars and their buttons)? Then we could easily sync the appearance of FreeCad on our computers, while we learn the program. Would make talking about things much easier!
Obviously, FreeCAD saves these settings somewhere, so there should be a way of exporting/importing them. I have found the “FreeCAD > data > GUI” folder. Can one simply adjust the settings on one computer, and then copy the whole folder to a different computer?? Seems like a hack. In addition, in this folder, I was not able to find any obvious settings that define the toolbar placements.
Most of the customiation is stored in user.cfg. Location of that file varies by operating system. I use linux so I know that my file is stored at ~/.config/FreeCAD/user.cfg
Most settings can be turned into a shareable ‘preference pack’ as well, this can include a customized stylesheet and I believe some basic python scripts. Regarding toolbar placement, I think that is handled by Qt as it has been a discussion topic in the past. I believe drmacro has explored exporting toolbar placements in the past and ran into difficulties.
I would prefer that we keep the posts in this thread on the topic of my color research though, so perhaps better to shift this line of conversation to a fresh thread.
Simply making a copy of the 3 files (system.cfg, user.cfg, FreeCAD.conf) and putting it on the target machine will essentially clone the setup from the source machine to the target machine.
The placement for toolbars and windows is handled differently. Windows (panels like Tree view, Tasks, etc.) are in Qt format in the FreeCAD.conf.
Toolbars are in user.cfg. The file is XML and the toolbars are stored in the Persistent workbench tag.
Much of the configuration can be saved as a preference pack and the pack can be distributed with the Addon manager.
Since, by default, only some of the configuration is saved in the Preference Pack the pack can be customized to save user specified additions and Python macros must be created as part of the custom Preference Pack to be put the user adds in a target install. (The issue I ran into was that when FreeCAD closes it writes the current values, which aren’t the ones added by the Python macro. This is because in many cases a value change doesn’t trigger a “reread” of the parameter table and it is the current parameter table that gets saved.)
Unless, there is need to distribute on a large scale, it’s just easier to copy the 3 files.
On rare not yet identified occasions the config can get out of whack. So it is sensible to keep a backup file after having made significant changes.
I apologize for hijacking your beautiful thread with my question… So, let me add to the topic of color schemes. There are some excellent articles and tools available that help in finding good and distinguishable colors. I am sure that you are aware of them, but they have not been mentioned yet in this thread, I believe..
- A fantastic website by Paul Tol about color shemes: https://personal.sron.nl/~pault/
- A discussion of color palettes on chartio.com. At the bottom, the article links to some color palette tools: https://chartio.com/learn/charts/how-to-choose-colors-data-visualization/
- One of those tools is by Cynthia Brewer, the “ColorBrewer”. Interestingly, in her suggestions, color schemes safe for colorblind people support at most 4 distinct colors/categories, while Paul Tol gives a 7-color Palette: https://colorbrewer2.org/
I have created a spreadsheet which dynamically checks colors against the background gradient and assigns a bad, acceptable, good (red, yellow, green respectively) color grading to the relative color contrast ratio.
I am sharing it here in case anyone wants to play around with it/improve it. I’ve hidden most of the irrelevant formulas/values as they are just steps to the final ratio shown. Note: some of these colors as used, should not require good contrast (ie display grids should be lower contrast)
A musing from this exercise is that I believe FreeCAD just has too many defined colors throughout. Referencing just the standard Workbenches I found 51 discreet color definitions in preferences. We need a better approach.
What about the possibility of a standard color palette (which could be customized by themers) that programmers can reference by a global variable rather than defining colors explicitly which contributes to an inconsistent visual experience across FreeCAD?
yorik, chennes, sliptonic et al. Thoughts?
2023-08-20_15-24.png
As always, very nice work. A unified color system throughout FreeCAD sounds like a) an excellent idea, and b) a ton of work. Still, if it’s something you are interested in undertaking I certainly won’t stop you!
Ok, so I’m largely unfamiliar with using the Path workbench, but just watched a few videos of it on youtube, and I think the colors don’t need to be changed, as it seems in most circumstances they are drawn over the model which is typically a lighter colors by default.
However, if that isn’t necessarily the case I would suggest a color change as follows for contrast against the newly proposed background gradient:
Normal Path: #70c270
Path Marker: #33ff33
Rapid Path: #ff6b6b
sliptonic please weigh in on this.