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Red-White shadow text is hard to read

Started by Spike, January 27, 2012, 12:53:44 AM

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Spike

People do not like to read help texts. We should make them easy to read. The red-white shadow text for headlines is IMHO quite hard to read.

prissi

Please suggest a better combination that works with most backgrounds. I am not very good at this.

Spike

Amber and green are good colors for reading on screen. It depends though how light the skin is overall. But with a black or dark gray drop shadow those might be better than red. I've attached an example with light green, but it uses my pak48.Excentrique skin since I have no other paks installed at the moment.

Another option is "fake bold". Increase the character spacing by one, and print the text twice with one pixel more to the right on the second pass. Looks like bold, but with some fonts it is hard to read. Would need a try to see if it works. I haven#t simulated that by screen editing, was too lazy.

prissi

Lazy bold give rather inreadable characters in japanese, as this often results in a black blog. I will try the green.

Spike

Right, the detailed characters will suffer a lot. Thank you for trying another color, I'm curious about your findings :)

Fabio

Could colours be set in a dat file (e.g. help.dat) instead of hardcoded? Thus every pakset could choose the best combination according to the chosen skin & background.