Re: WANTED: Design for documentation (Photoshop power users!)

[Robin Bannister]

Me answering Rheinhold:
> > The pale yellow/light brown would make the navbars almost invisible on TFT 
> > screens, so I think the current state is much better. 
> ...
> So what/where is the current state? 

Sorry, I got mixed up; I thought this meant the navbars would disappear. 
But now I think it means they would still be legible (and could be used) 
but the cohesion provided by their background would be lost. 


Patrick McCarty wrote:
> In the case where the vertical scrollbar is visible for the TOC pane, 
> using a white background would be fine.  But for a page like [1], the 
> TOC pane would no longer appear to be a pane, and I would argue for 
> using color to indicate its separation (as it currently is). 
> [1] http://kainhofer.com/~lilypond/Documentation/user/lilypond-internals/index.html 

Yes, I wasn't proposing white; that was just an intermediate stage in the 
argument. But this is a good answer for Patrick H. 

Well, fairly good. 
If the backgound difference can become "almost invisible" then 
the separation will surely be lost in this case too. 
But I suppose secondary clues (like placement) help out a bit. 


I wanted to see what "almost invisible" meant and tried this out (with IE6) 
on some flat screens. 
Navbars very visible on a BenQ monitor and an Inspiron laptop, both 2006. 
I could see the effect an a low-end 1998 laptop, but was a lot more 
bothered by other presentation problems, like text size versus screen size. 
Things were squeezed together too much; colour wouldn't have unjumbled it. 


The navbars have their own secondary clues (like brackety buttons and the 
grouped layout) so you would hardly mistake them for normal text. 
But a backgound is helpful for recognition, e.g. when a scrolling moves 
a navbar back into view. 
So: navbars same hue as TOC, but (only) slightly denser. Me, toeing my line. :)


Cheers,
Robin