mark@sunquest.UUCP (Mark McCourt) (08/04/89)
I have heard that Motif's 3-D appearance looks great in color but pretty poor in black and white. Any opinions?
vania@OSF.OSF.ORG (Vania Joloboff) (08/04/89)
Are you talking of a monochrome or gray scale screen ? 3D effects need 4 different tones (colors). On a color screen it is easily achieved. Gray scale is less flashy but is pretty effective -- see Next, Bull workstations, etc. Moreover, MOTIF window manager is more effective with 8 colors: 3 for borders of window that do not have focus 3 for the focus-sed window, so that you know immediately which one it is, and 2 for background and foreground. You do not really need those, you can manage with 4 distinct tones, but it looks better with 8. On monochrome screen, you must emulate the gray scales by halftoning, using pixmaps. The effectiveness of the 3D look depends mostly on: 1) the artist who designed your pixmap patterns. 2) the software engineer who put the appropriate patterns into your Xdefault 3) your screen resolution. The same halftone pattern may have different effect according to pixel shape and size. So, it is not true that OSF/MOTIF is "pretty poor in black and white" but it is true that the effect needs fine tuning to be achieved. Vania
jbb@hpcvlx.HP.COM (Jim B. Byers) (08/05/89)
>I have heard that Motif's 3-D appearance looks >great in color but pretty poor in black and white. Not true, I have been using the hpwm (HP windows) manager and applications based on the HP widget set for many months. These look and behave surprisingly like Motif :-). Currently I am running mwm - the Motif window manager- and am very pleased with the appearance of these on my mono screen. Generally what you want is to use a grey or pattern root window, white top shadow color, black bottom shadow color. A more pleasing setting may be to use some of the dithered patterns for the topShadowPixmap settings, bottomShadowPixmap settings etc. The 3D effect is really very good. These settings need to be made in a suitable way such as defaults files etc. If no system defaults, .Xdefaults etc are present the generic Motif window manager or applications may not be to your taste. The Motif toolkit does not force an application to provide good default monochrome behavior, but makes it easy to do. In other words it is easy to use dithered shadows because they are easy to specify and the functionality is there but a developer does not have to implement it if they don't want to. BTW there are some good ways to make the 3D effect look crummy on monochrome. For example, provide an .Xdefaults, app-defaults etc. file to an unsuspecting user. Make sure that it refers to lots of colors. The defaults behavior of an application will be overridden by these settings. The user will see lots of flat looking stuff at best and black on black (or white on white) at worst. A better idea is to provide some defaults for monochrome under a separate name. For example, provide settings for mono_mwm and have the user run mwm -name mono_mwm ...... when (s)he starts up a program (mwm in this example). This can be important because many people provide system defaults on the hub of a diskless cluster. Every node uses the same system defaults unless they have there own .Xdefaults. In short, the 3D effect is very good on monochrome. Developers and system administrators need to make sure that they take advantage of it and do not override it. Jim Byers Corvallis Information Systems I love those sharp, crisp mono displays with lots of real estate.
jbb@hpcvlx.HP.COM (Jim B. Byers) (08/05/89)
Also, patterned title bars are now possible because there is a "clean text" property that allows title bar text to be unaffected by surrounding dither patterns. This was not a feature of hpwm, which caused some people to stick to white or black title bars. I settled for using vtbold title text as it was less effected by my "vertical" dithering pattern. I now use "horizontal" for inactive windows. Also you will find that the "inactive" window settings (properties?) set the menu and icons also. So you may want to set the: Mwm*menu*.... settings and Mwm*icon*..... settings to override. As an aid we will be providing monochrome settings for mwm in the HP X11 product. Hope that this helps. Jim Byers Hewlett Packard Corvallis Information Systems Have you hugged your workstation today?