lumiera_/doc/technical/gui/GuiTheme.txt

Lumiera GUI style and theming
=============================

//Menu: label Theme/Style

_this page collects some pieces of information regarding the visual appearance of the Lumiera GTK UI_


GTK-3 styles
------------
Styling of GTK-3 interfaces is based on CSS, with some specific conventions about the selectors
and some additional makro functions to generate colours and gradients. When GTK actually renders a widget,
id consults a 'strategy object' known as *Theme Engine*, passing it the region to draw in a abstracted way.
The Theme Engine in turn uses a '``style provider''' to retrieve the generic style properties it uses for drawing.
Thus, the Theme Engine defines the actual meaning of any style and is in the position to understand and thus
introduce additional engine specific styles and settings.

GTK-3 supports the powerful 'cascading' and 'contextual selectors' from CSS. Thus the nesting of elements
in the GUI forms the base for creating styling rules. Hereby, widget class names translate into ``tag'' names
in the CSS selectors.footnote:[The ``tag'' name is the widget's class name without the `Gtk::` prefix, and transformed
into all lower caps, single word, no underscores. E.g. `Gtk::TextView` -> `textview`]
Widgets may also expose CSS classes for styling -- the standard widgets define a generic set
of https://developer.gnome.org/gtk3/3.4/GtkStyleContext.html#gtkstylecontext-classes[predefined CSS style classes],
which can be used to establish the foundation for theming. Obviously it is preferable to keep styling rules as
concise, generic and systematic as possible; yet we may still refer to individual gui elements by name (`#ID`) though.

Recommended reading
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
 * for technically precise coverage, consult the pages
   https://developer.gnome.org/gtk3/3.4/GtkCssProvider.html[GtkCssProvider]
   and
   https://developer.gnome.org/gtk3/3.4/GtkStyleContext.html#gtkstylecontext-classes[predefined style classes]
   in the GTK-3 reference manual.
 * there is an https://developer.gnome.org/gtk3/stable/chap-css-overview.html[overview page in the developer manual],
   and a https://developer.gnome.org/gtk3/stable/chap-css-properties.html[reference of supported properties].
 * to start, look at this http://thegnomejournal.wordpress.com/2011/03/15/styling-gtk-with-css/[introductory text],
   or the more http://worldofgnome.org/making-gtk3-themes-part-1-basics/[hands-on series of articles from world of gnome]
 * this http://forums.fedoraforum.org/showthread.php?t=281568[post from fedora forum] features a conciese description
   of the task of theme creation
 * to understand the old (now obsolete) GTK-2 stylesheets, you might
   http://orford.org/gtk/[look here]


difficulties when learning how to style
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Unfortunately, documentation about creating GTK-3 themes is still fragmentary. Most people seem to learn by
studying existing themes. To make matters worse, CSS allows to address every widget under various contextual
constraints -- and people tend to approach such abundant possibilities with a case-by-case attitude, instead
of a systematic approach, and this leads to incredible large and redundant stylesheets.

Often we'll also face the perils of over-constrained settings. More so, since every system contains several
style sheets, and settings from those are combined (``cascaded''). When things are specified multiple times
redundantly at different levels, we can never be sure as to _which_ change actually caused a visible effect.
A good recommendation is really to ``probe'' settings by changing them temporarily to a really obvious value
(e.g. `background-color: red`). It is just too easy to learn wrong techniques based on false conclusions.


the GTK+ inspector
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
An essential tool when working with styles and Gtk widgets in general is the
https://wiki.gnome.org/Projects/GTK%2B/Inspector[GTK+ inspector], which is part of the standard GTK distribution.
It allows to inspect all GTK objects with their properties, and to see the actual tree of CSS nodes and the
corresponding selectors. You can even add a style class or state flag (like ``hover'') dynamically, and you
may add style rules and verify the effect on the application immediately. To use this ispector, launch the
application like `GTK_DEBUG=interactive target/lumiera`


binary themes
~~~~~~~~~~~~~
GTK-3 supports binary theme bundles, which combine CSS style sheets and accompanying images and vector graphics
into a single archive file. See http://wibblystuff.blogspot.de/2012/06/building-binary-for-gtk3-theme.html[this blog entry]
for a tutorial. But when it comes to investigating an existing theme, we need a way to 'extract' the original sources
from such a distribution bundle. This can be achieved with the help of the `gresource` command. The following bash
srcipt footnote:[published  by mailto:peter@thecodergeek.com[Peter Gordon] to the Public Domain 
http://projects.thecodergeek.com/scripts/gresource-extract[at his blog] in 2012] simplifies this process, allowing 
to extract all resource files in a given GResource file, with the given base URL. For example, if a GResource file
contained the resource with the URL `/org/foo/bar/baz.txt`, and the base URL defined as `"/org/foo/"`, then the resource
named `/org/foo/bar/baz.txt` in that file would be extracted and written to `bar/baz.txt` in the current directory.

[source, bash]
---------------------------------
#!/bin/bash

# The GResource file name
GR_FILE="gtk.gresource"

# base URL of  the extracted resources
GR_BASEDIR="/org/gnome/"


which gresource &>/dev/null
if [ $? -ne 0 ]; then
	echo "Unable to find gresource program in PATH."
	exit 1
fi

for RSRC in $(gresource list $GR_FILE)
do
	RSRC_FILE=$(echo "${RSRC#$GR_BASEDIR}")
	mkdir -p $(dirname "$RSRC_FILE") ||:
	gresource extract "$GR_FILE" "$RSRC" > "$RSRC_FILE"
done
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