Bug #7154 dark text unreadable

[madhava]

Hello,
I was trying to solve issue #7154 (Black axis label text on grey background is unreadable in Plot Spectrum in Dark Theme on Mac · Issue #7154 · audacity/audacity · GitHub)
I was able to find a temporary fix by altering the unreadable (in dark mode) black text into a shade of pink, which works with all themes present in release-3.7.1 (screenshots attached).

I did this by modifying the code in FreqWindow.cpp(lines 291 and 376) which altered the vertical and horizontal axes text colors by directly writing the color codes.

  S.StartVerticalLay(2);
  {
           //.TickColour( theTheme.Colour( clrGraphLabels ) ) // previous code
           .TickColour( wxColour(200, 50, 120) ) // pink vertical axis text
     );

But I was not able to determine the theme user is in and accordingly use a light and dark text color (if user is in dark and light modes respectively).
Can anyone please suggest how I can solve this issue permanently?

[steve]

@madhava

Can anyone please suggest how I can solve this issue permanently?

Muse Group are working on Audacity version 4, which will use Qt rather than WxWidgets. This update will totally change how themes work in Audacity. Any fix that you come up with now will become obsolete when Audacity 4 is released.

[madhava]

Oh, okay. Could you please clarify the following points:

1. Which parts of Audacity will remain the same? Are they deprecating any portions of the codebase?
2. Regarding changes to the UI, should I do it in the MuseScore repo?
3. What issues/bugs in Audacity are still relevant to the AU3 → AU4 migration?

[LWinterberg]

check libraries/lib-theme-resources. There’ll you find a eg dark/components/colors.txt in which you can define certain colors. There also is a C++ file somewhere which translates the colors.txt to values to the clrSomethingOrOther things you see elsewhere in the code.

@madhava

Which parts of Audacity will remain the same? Are they deprecating any portions of the codebase?

This is difficult to say holistically. Eventually, we’ll want to completely axe the dependency on wxWidgets, though in the meantime quite a bit of it will survive under wraps via src/au3wrap (in master). What needs a redo to be useful in Audacity 4.0 will get a redo, what doesn’t will just get a wrap.

@madhava

Regarding changes to the UI, should I do it in the MuseScore repo?

Depends on where its coming from. I believe anything in framework comes from Musescore, while anything else would be the Audacity implementation.

@madhava

What issues/bugs in Audacity are still relevant to the AU3 → AU4 migration?

We don’t know which bits will survive. I’ve went ahead and closed a bunch of bugs which definitely won’t survive, but there are others which may or may not survive, depending on the exact implementation.

If you want to contribute to Audacity 4, the place to look would probably be our boards:

[AU4] Main Board • audacity

Anything in “ready for dev” in the mainboard that isn’t assigned to anyone probably won’t be touched for quite some time by us, so feel free to beat us to the bunch there.

[AU4] Backlog • audacity

And the backlog we likely don’t even have scheduled for Audacity 4.0, so there’s plenty of time to get onto those.

[madhava]

Thanks a lot for the detailed response.

I have made the required changes to colors.txt and created a Pull Request (#8238).

I went through the links you shared and started working on an issue. Appreciate the guidance and help.

[madhava]

Hi @LWinterberg ,

I’m trying to build Audacity 4 on my machine and followed the Build instructions. I’m facing issues with the Qt installer (ss attached), specifically the mirror link. I’m not able to proceed to the installation of required folders.

I tried to manually download Qt but the build didn’t succeed due to missing file issues in Qt Network auth. I’m from India, if you could guide me to fix the issue, it would be very helpful as I want to work on further issues. Thanks

[LWinterberg]

Maybe your IP range is being blocked by Qt. You may want to try a VPN to get around that.

[madhava]

Ok the VPN method worked. But even in the archive, I’m unable to find versions before Qt 6.5.3
How do I find 6.2.4 which is specifically recommended for AU4?

[LWinterberg]

once you enable the archives, you need to click “filter” again to get the older stuff.

[madhava]

AU4 is up and running, thanks @LWinterberg !!