Saturday, August 21, 2010

Re: Silly question maybe: What's the purpose of color schemes

On 21/08/10 08:03, John Little wrote:
[...]
> With a black background, the colour contrasts in syntax colouring are
> much stronger, considering light levels. For example, green on white
> in RGB is #00FF00 on #FFFFFF, that's roughly 33% on 100%, a factor of
> 3. Inverted, magenta on black, #FF00FF on #000000, 66% on 0%, is a
> larger factor. I suppose I should calculate that as 66% on about 8%,
> the level at which I just fail to read.
> With a black or quite dark background, there are more usable colours
> for syntax highlighting. On a white background, colours near yellow or
> cyan are unreadable, but only blue on black has trouble.
>
> Regards, John
>

I don't know why, but the "dark" schemes that some people use seem less
contrasting to me. You'll say the contrast is the same, but for some
reason, white on black (#FFFFFF foreground on #000000 background)
strikes me as "harder to read" than black on white (#000000 foreground
on #FFFFFF background). Maybe some "dark-loving" people use less bright
text colours (#CCCCCC maybe, or even #800000), which would of course
reduce the contrast, even though 0xFFFFFF divided by zero and 0x800000
divided by zero are both infinite; maybe it's the way my monitor
displays black vs. white pixels for text vs. background, I just don't know.

About there being more usable colours, I'm not convinced. Cyan (as in
blue sky) vs. white (as in white clouds) has never given me any "low
contrast" problem; in fact at the moment the "quoted text" in my mailer
is some shade of cyan text on the white background, and it's perfectly
readable. I'll agree that yellow on white is usually too low contrast;
but you'll notice that blue on black is the ones-complement of yellow on
white.


Best regards,
Tony.
--
Since we have to speak well of the dead, let's knock them while they're
alive.
-- John Sloan

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