Changing Text colour in Arranger tabs

[Harley Dear]

I really like the arranger tabs - they're great.

There's one tweak that would be nice if we can be indulgent. That is to change the colour of text in the custom arranger tabs you make because if you want to use light colour ( or bright ) background, the white text is too hard to see.

Harley 

Edited October 16, 2022 by Harley Dear

[sjoens]

Or use contrasting colors.

Same but opposite issue with PRV Note Name colors being too dark.

[Lord Tim]

I do wonder if some logic could be baked into this to cater for "unworkable" colours? I just tried a white colour and... yeah, you can guess how that looked. @msmcleod - is this eye-stabbingly difficult to implement something to detect the perceived lightness and flip the foreground text colour?

[msmcleod]

2 minutes ago, Lord Tim said:

I do wonder if some logic could be baked into this to cater for "unworkable" colours? I just tried a white colour and... yeah, you can guess how that looked. @msmcleod - is this eye-stabbingly difficult to implement something to detect the perceived lightness and flip the foreground text colour?

We did have something that did that using an off-the-shelf algorithm to detect whether to use black text or white text, however it got it wrong so often, we abandoned it in favour of picking a standard palette that would support white text.

It's worth revisiting though... maybe we can find a better algorithm or solution.

[Lord Tim]

I haven't done any testing to see how this looks here, but would using the background colour and then inverting + desaturating it for the foreground be a workable solution? You'd run into issues around middle grey, so perhaps a detection of where it falls on either side of #7F7F7F and to have it lean it towards either #000000 or #FFFFFF depending on what it "sees" ?

Standard disclaimer of "it should be easy enough to do...." and "making assumptions you're not tied up with other priorities" goes here!

[Matthew White]

I definitely think it would be handy if this could be changed in the same area as you can select the background colors for these on a per clip basis if auto detect isn't possible.

[Lord Tim]

Yeah, like an overwrite for the default if it doesn't suit.

The predefined colour palette works great with the white text, but when we choose our own "out of spec" colours, that's when we're running into the problems, so a foreground text choice might be the easiest solution?

[Promidi]

12 hours ago, msmcleod said:

It's worth revisiting though... maybe we can find a better algorithm or solution.

like exposing that text colour in the Theme Editor perhaps?

[Lord Tim]

5 hours ago, Promidi said:

like exposing that text colour in the Theme Editor perhaps?

The only thing that's a bit of a gotcha there is not every colour will need the same text colour. So, for example, I could do a verse in dark blue which would look good in white text, but then if I did the chorus in pale yellow, white doesn't work. If we changed the text colour in the Theme Editor to black, that would change everything and fix the pale yellow one, but we'd now have problems with the dark blue one.

If we did expose this in the Theme Editor, it'd definitely need to be in combination with one of the other ideas mentioned in the thread.