The International Simutrans Forum

Development => Bug Reports => Topic started by: Spike on January 27, 2012, 12:53:44 AM

Title: Red-White shadow text is hard to read
Post by: Spike on January 27, 2012, 12:53:44 AM
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.
Title: Re: Red-White shadow text is hard to read
Post by: prissi on January 27, 2012, 11:23:32 PM
Please suggest a better combination that works with most backgrounds. I am not very good at this.
Title: Re: Red-White shadow text is hard to read
Post by: Spike on January 28, 2012, 12:23:14 PM
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.
Title: Re: Red-White shadow text is hard to read
Post by: prissi on January 28, 2012, 09:49:00 PM
Lazy bold give rather inreadable characters in japanese, as this often results in a black blog. I will try the green.
Title: Re: Red-White shadow text is hard to read
Post by: Spike on January 28, 2012, 11:37:46 PM
Right, the detailed characters will suffer a lot. Thank you for trying another color, I'm curious about your findings :)
Title: Re: Red-White shadow text is hard to read
Post by: Fabio on January 29, 2012, 12:10:22 AM
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.