A better dark mode

[pedropintosilva]

First things first: For everyone who has been following CODE release, testing it, reporting bugs and overall helping. Thank you!

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Hi all, I'm creating this issue to leverage all the valuable feedback that the community has been sending and hopefully lay out the plan towards a better dark mode.

Plan and the issues it fixes

Here are the main issues we are been tracking closely by order of importance.

• [ ] #9060
  • Dark mode doesn’t invert style colours set by the user. Example: Default automatic colour styles in nextcloud writer #3494: https://github.com/nextcloud/richdocuments/issues/3494
  • Dark styled text is unreadable: Black and any other colour that has low contrast against dark background such as this dark purple bullet
  • Dark mode doesn’t switch text from black to white if the font colour is not set to “automatic” in the style
  • Dark mode doesn’t invert text colour even if the font colour is set to ‘automatic’ in the cases where the text is above a shape that is black or the page/slide has a black background we still end up with unreadable text. A fix is on its way 165024: ONLINE: Set automatic fontcolor according to background color: https://gerrit.libreoffice.org/c/core/+/165024.
  • Dark mode doesn't affect slide show2
  • Dark mode doesn’t invert text colour in relation to character highlight colour. A text set to ‘automatic’ font colour and white highlight doesn’t get inverted when the user switched from light to dark mode →
• [x] #9061
  • [x] #9062
  • Unable to switch mode selectively. There are cases where user would like to switch off dark mode for document only when the dark mode is on. Examples: Wants to colour/print proof simulate; Needs to check how the document will look like before exporting; Wants to edit document while making sure the company branding guidelines are being followed. There is some initial steps in the works config: remove scheme document background colors #8564: https://github.com/CollaboraOnline/online/pull/8564
  • [x] #9231
  • [x] #9629
  • [x] #9538
  • [x] #9627
  • [x] #9628
  • [x] #9630
  • [ ] Allow dark mode for the UI to be disabled
  • Integrator that have their very own custom UI (for example always dark) are unable to toggle between dark and light mode in the document only so they can have more control over how their customizations and UI are handled.
• [x] #7888
  • [x] #9632
• [x] #9631

Context

Fixing user's documents seems impossible for a few reasons and even if it was possible it sounds based on a poor premise: would we be really fixing it? I can think of a few cases where that would not result in the expected output while taking the control from the end user. Thus, it seems to me that the right approach is to bite the bullet and just go ahead and implement https://github.com/CollaboraOnline/online/issues/9060. This will fix the overall experience. The other issues are of a less importance but still good to track them.

[Ornanovitch]

Hey there!

Lately I've been thinking again about all these dark theme stories. I am convinced of the way you want to solve the problem in general (dynamic document color inversion), but I have to say I still don't understand the overall strategy.

We have two dark mode levels: the ui dark mode and the document dark mode. The first one is mature, it's even lovable! People who appreciate dark mode do want to use it. The second one has many (small but real) problems that makes it objectively an experimental feature.

While you have these two completely different maturity states for two different features, you persist to make the less mature one on by default when one could just want the mature one. And then you develop a button to disable the problematic experimental feature (invert background) for those who want a mature and basic dark mode (just the ui).

I feel this way of deploying dark mode is counter-intuitive: you already have a good ui dark mode, why not let users benefit from it easily, intuitively? And for those who really want a document color inversion (which is not systematically nor strictly a dark mode IMO), the "invert background" button could be used (but it should be renamed: "invert document colors (experimental)".

I hope you understand my point of view. I really like CO's work, I just want to help with some UX thoughts that I've been thinking about for a long time...

[jancborchardt]

Looking at this related longer standing issue from our side, it looks like a lot of items are already resolved as well – right @pedropintosilva?