Re: [Pan-users] Problems building Pan from git.

[Duncan]

Christian Dysthe posted on Fri, 17 Jan 2014 11:11:37 -0600 as excerpted:

> Hi,
> 
> I am no developer or even Linux expert, but I wanted to build Pan from
> git and got it to build with gtk3 and spellcheck. No major errors
> recorded either. However, the applications looks like this:
> 
> https://www.dropbox.com/s/qtgjqwx5rv3gii5/Screenshot%20from%
202014-01-17%2011%3A04%3A36.png
> 
> I have tried to adjust the color setting and can get it usable, but
> there's no way I can get the colors in the body to show correctly.
> 
> I'm on Ubuntu 13.10 x64. What am I doing wrong?

Two notes:

1) In general, building with gtk2 is still recommended, and AFAIK what 
most distros (including my own, gentoo) do.  As you found, pan built on 
gtk3 does build and work in general, but it's not as well tested, and 
people who try it often post here with various corner-case issues such as 
the one you just reported.

We'd need someone (preferrably more than one, using pan different ways, 
with one person having a strong light text on dark backgrounds pref as I 
do, and one with the apparently more common light/white background, dark 
text, pref) with good developer and patching skills, who is familiar 
enough with gtk3 to trace down the remaining usability issues and propose 
patches, before pan's gtk3 build is considered ready for prime-time.

2) I'm not sure how applicable this is to a gtk3 build, but as I said my 
prefs are light on dark, which means I have nearly all pan's color prefs 
set non-default.

I found I had to set text color (bottom of colors tab in pan prefs, under 
other text), or I couldn't read some things due to light-on-light or dark-
on-dark (apparently pan was taking either foreground or background 
settings from my standard gtk2 prefs, I don't remember which, but not 
both, so they were both near the same color and I couldn't read).

The trouble with that, however, is that while I can at least read the 
text now, that setting unfortunately overrides some of the others, and 
I'm not a coder so I can't easily go in and read/hack around until I 
figure out why and suggest a patch to fix it properly.

In particular, once other text color is set, body pane quoted text 
settings get ignored, with all quoted text appearing in the "other text" 
color, so I no longer have color-differentiated quotes. =:^(


So try setting "other text, text color" (and background).  If that works 
on gtk3, good, tho you might have the quote color override problem I'm 
seeing.  If it doesn't, try building with gtk2.  You should be able to 
set it then, but you probably /will/ have the quote color override 
problem I'm seeing, since that's what I'm using.

-- 
Duncan - List replies preferred.   No HTML msgs.
"Every nonfree program has a lord, a master --
and if you use the program, he is your master."  Richard Stallman