Tool-tips in Gimp

[royleith]

This problem goes back a long way. The Gimp Tool-tips are very light grey on very light grey and are almost unreadable. I think this is because Gimp does not use the native KDE gadget system. Perhaps Gimp uses gtk, but I have not been able to verify this.

In 14.10 and previous versions, the font background and foreground colours could be changed in System Settings in order to improve readability. That module seems to be missing in 15.04 and 15.10. Is there a way to restore that module?

[claydoh]

The problem is, I think, is that there is not as of yet a gtk2 theme (which the gimp would use) that translates kde's plasma 5 default Breeze desktop look And colors to gtk based applications. The theme in kde4 is called oxygen-gtk.

The settings to change colors is in the same place but you probably want to look at the gtk2 theme in System Settings and try different ones to see if one suits you better.

Sent from my LG-H900 using Tapatalk

[royleith]

Goldfish in a bag, but no cuddly toy

Thanks for the clues. I've discovered an awful lot of stuff, but not a solution!

Firstly, GTK is short for GIMP Tool Kit. Who knew?

I might have added something to System Settings during my searches in muon, but I think the following was there from the start:

GTK Themes are set in System Settings-Appearance/Application Style/Gnome Application Style (GTK). Themes for GTK2&3, Font/Font Size, toolbar behaviour and icon themes can be set. As far as I can tell, this only applies to window colours, GTK widget and window furniture styles and Title/Menu fonts. I found the GTK configuration files in ~.config and in /usr/share and there are only settings for the same things as in System Settings.

Having failed to find GTK themes to download in System Settings-Appearance/Workspace Theme I discovered several, pre-installed themes in Gnome Application Style (GTK), including oxygen-gtk. The default is Orion. As expected, none of the GTK themes changed Tool-tip fonts or colours.

GTK must take at least some of its settings from KDE Plasma. System Settings-Appearance/Colour-Colours-Common Colours allows many KDE colours to be changed including Tool-tips foreground and background. The default Tool-tips background colour is black. That setting does not transfer to GTK Tool-types and it is the light-grey default background that is the problem. In KDE4 the foreground colour did transfer to GTK and could be set to a darker colour visible against both the KDE background and the GTK background. However, the foreground colour no longer transfers to GTK. I thought that the mapping might occur when Kubuntu starts up, but a shut-down and start-up did not change anything.

So, I have not solved the GTK Tool-tips issue, but I have discovered how to get better fonts in Opera-developer and Gimp! I'm going to search the GTK Developer pages to see if the colours are controlled by GTK text files. I'm hoping that they are not hard-coded in the GTK includes.

[claydoh]

I have my Gtk styles set to oxygen-gtk for Gtk2, and Orion for gtk3

Here are my tooltips



And setting Gtk2 to Orion:


You have to restart the application to see any changes made.

What color scheme are you using, if not the default Breeze?

[royleith]

I had assumed that Gimp used the Gimp Tool Kit No. 3. In one of the many web-sites I visited and dated around 2010 the comment was made that Gimp tends to be a version behind on GTK. I had assumed that Gimp would have caught up by now.

Thanks.

I have reset the theme to Breeze and selected the same Gtk styles that you cited and all is now well.

[NoWorries]

Thanks for all the guidance on how to make Gimp Tool-tips more visible. As I prefer the Oxygen look with sculptured buttons, I decided to see how well it worked if I stayed with Oxygen instead of changing to Breeze.

So I did the following: System Settings > Application Style > Gnome Application (GTK) GTK2 and GTK3 Themes I set to oxygen-gtk. This results in sculptured tips as shown below.