Unable to read "moving" tool-tip

Audacity has a specific type of tool-tip that I cannot read on my system. I have searched for another application that has the same type of tool-tip, but not found one, so I think — but I could well be wrong — that this is an Audacity-specific type of tool-tip.

I am referring not to the normal tool-tip that appears when you hover your mouse over something, but to the tool-tip that changes value as you drag your mouse. Specifically, I am referring to the value that shows when you drag the Playback Speed button on the toolbar.

With the help of vasa1 on the Ubuntu forum, where I discussed my problem, we determined that the problem was the theme, with black writing on a black background. It seems to happen only on Ubuntu 11.04, 11.10 and 12.04, but I was unable to test earlier versions, unfortunately.

To demonstrate what I mean, here are screen-shots showing both the normal tool-tip (on Windows 7 and Ubuntu 12.04) and the “moving-mouse” tool-tip (I don’t know the correct name for it). It works fine on Windows. (As I can only add three attachments, I’ve omitted one of the four that I have.)

First: The “hover” tool-tip, which works correctly on both Windows and Ubuntu.

Ubuntu
Tooltip hover Ubuntu.png
Second: The “drag” tool-tip, which works correctly on Windows but not on Ubuntu.

Windows
Tooltip hold Windows.png
Ubuntu
Tooltip hold Ubuntu .png
As you can see, on Ubuntu it is unreadable.

I do not know whether to raise this as a bug on Ubuntu or here. I would appreciate some advice from those who know Audacity better so that I can proceed.

More information
Operating system: Ubuntu 12.04 fully updated
Audacity: 2.0.0 installed from the standard repository

I have discovered that the problem lies in Audacity’s choice of colours. Audacity specifies the “moving” tooltip’s colour as black, instead of using the theme. As Ubuntu’s tooltip background colour is black, this renders the tooltip unreadable.

There is a workaround (given in that same thread) to change the background colour of the tooltips. Unfortunately, it changes the entire theme system-wide.

The preferred solution would be for Audacity to use the theme’s specified colour for the tooltip rather than forcing it black.

May I report this as a bug?

Thanks, it is logged here already:
Bug 518 – Click-to-see-slider-value tooltips unreadable .

You can double-click on the slider knob to show a text box displaying the slider value.

I think it would be better simply to show the slider value in the hover tooltip (possibly without any hover timeout); clicking anywhere in the slider would restore or refresh the hover tooltip with the value clicked at. See the Graphic EQ sliders in Effect > Equalization for how it might work.



Gale

Thank you, Gale.