Command Bars - 256 color mode

256 color mode

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Topic: 256 color mode

Posted By: artsd
Subject: 256 color mode
Date Posted: 07 January 2007 at 4:29pm

I am a new user to the toolkit and am updating a VS6 application to use the Ribbon and Skins. We have customers who run our application on Windows 2000 Terminal Server with a 256 color remote desktop connection.

I am letting the user choose the skin to use and will let them disable the skinning so that will work for low colors.

But I must have the Ribbon and it looks very bad in 256 color mode.

Any solution to this?

I tried OFFICE2007BLUE.INI, OFFICE2007AQUA.INI, OFFICE2007BLACK.INI, and OFFICE2007SILVER.INI.

Silver is the best of the bunch but that is not saying much.

Replies:

Posted By: artsd
Date Posted: 07 January 2007 at 4:51pm

I just realized that when running in 256 mode, the skinning is completely ignored, which is fine behavior by me.

I suppose the solution to the ribbon problem is to clone the \Ribbon\Styles\Office2007Aqua project and redo all of the PNG files to use the standard 256 Windows system colors and tweak all the colors in the Office2007Theme.INI file.

Unfortunately, this requires actual artistic skill and is no small undertaking.

The only other option I see is to implement 2 completely seperate UI methodologies -- one using nice ribbon and one using traditional menus/toolbars for 256 color mode -- this is very undesirable to me!

BTW: ribbon and skin looks fine when running remote desktop with 15 bit color or higher, so only 256 color mode is a problem.

Posted By: Oleg
Date Posted: 08 January 2007 at 3:17am

Hello,

Just tried Office Ribbon and our with 256 color and indeed it must be changed.

Thank you we will add support of 256 colors for 11.0 release.

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Oleg, Support Team
CODEJOCK SOFTWARE SOLUTIONS

Posted By: artsd
Date Posted: 08 January 2007 at 8:23am

I did some testing and had some success using The GIMP editor to dither the PNG files to the standard EGA palette. This works for some but not all due to stretching issues.

What I would really like to see is a ribbon theme that just uses the 16 system colors -- probably done in traditional greys.

I am willing to create such a gray theme. Is there any documentation on how each of the PNG files is used and scaled (besides looking at the source code)?

For example, I discovered that 'Office2007_RibbonGroups.png' is stretched horizontally to fill the width of the entire ribbon, but the actual 2 pixel border on the left and right edge of the PNG is not stretched.

Is there a document that described how each PNG file is manipulated?

Posted By: Oleg
Date Posted: 08 January 2007 at 4:38pm

No :(

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Oleg, Support Team
CODEJOCK SOFTWARE SOLUTIONS