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[Doitsu]

Originally Posted by KevinH

So DiapDelaer, Doitsu, eschwartz, and varlog, what desktop/theme are you using with your builds?

I'm using OpenBox with the Clearlooks theme.

[roger64]

Originally Posted by eschwartz

Actually the meta editor thing seems to be some form of theme stupidity.

Gtk 3.20 made a lot of things look weird but on the laptop that did not get updated yet, it looks like this: Attachment 147972

...

I am almost positive the same error appeared in calibre Editor's File Browser list at one point.

I also met this kind of error (white and black characters mixed) whenever I tried to rename a file with the Calibre Editor. Kovid's advised workaround was simple... : use the Calibre style in Preferences. It did work.

https://www.mobileread.com/forums/sho...d.php?t=271382

[eschwartz]

@roger64
Maybe that is what I was thinking of then.

...

i now rediscovered the unfixed error in calibre. It acts just like Sigil.
System styles are a nightmare. Quite ugly too IMHO. Maybe it would be nice to do like calibre and ship with a guaranteed good theme.

...

FWIW, Cinnamon desktop, with the default Adwaita theme. And building Sigil against Qt 5.4.2 does look a lot nicer.

EDIT: Only in a chroot for Arch @ 6/15/2015 w/ qt5.4.2
Using the official Qt build in /opt/Qt5.4.2 it still looks bad. Stinking themes.

GUI looks on linux have gone down the toilet recently. This stuff is supposed to just work.

[eschwartz]

I downloaded the official Qt 5.4.2 installer, and installed it to /opt/Qt5.4.2

cmake -G "Unix Makefiles" \
    -DINSTALL_BUNDLED_DICTS=0 \
    -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=./usr \
    -DCMAKE_C_FLAGS:STRING="${CFLAGS}" \
    -DCMAKE_CXX_FLAGS:STRING="${CXXFLAGS}" \
    -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release \
    -DCMAKE_PREFIX_PATH=/opt/Qt5.4.2/5.4/gcc/lib/cmake \
    ..
make
make install
./usr/bin/sigil

...

The meta editor still has the same dysfunctional look.

This appeared sometime since June 15, 2015 which was the ALA arch-chroot I initially used to test Qt 5.4.2

[KevinH]

Okay, based on eschwartz proof it is not Qt version specific and based on roger64's link and and then searching the calibre github site to see where QApplication is subclassed and the styles and fonts are set, I think this is definitely QStyle style related not font related. The possible Qt QStyles that are built in include things like gtk, gtk2, fusion, macintosh, windows, windowsvista, motif, plus there are some GNOME related styles as well.

See http://doc.qt.io/qt-5/gallery.html

It seems there are Qt bugs with all versions of Qt and some "gtk" "gtk2" specific QStyles.

The arch linux site has a bit about these QStyle related issues here:

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php...K_applications

From looking at the calibre code, the "calibre style" seems to be based off of "fusion" and not the default system style.

So would somone who sees the problem on Linux please try with a "fusion" based style/theme as their system default so that we can see if that workaround makes the problem go away.

If so, I may be able to hard-code some things in Sigil just for Linux that return specific QStyle types to force them to be "fusion" based.

Please let us know what you find out?

Thanks,

KevinH

[DiapDealer]

It's gotta be themes, or the DE, or something else, because the metadata editor looks just fine on my machine with the official Qt5.4.2. Nothing dysfunctional at all (unless I'm blind--which isn't entirely impossible ).

Oops ... Kevin posted in the meantime.

[eschwartz]

As a Qt app, you can simply use `sigil -style Fusion` to force the fusion theme. It works perfectly, and quite frankly looks a lot better on general principle.

I might even be persuaded to start caring about themes at the rate things are going. I've always been a mostly oblivious user of themes and fonts and stuff but things are reaching a tipping point...

[DiapDealer]

Originally Posted by eschwartz

As a Qt app, you can simply use `sigil -style Fusion` to force the fusion theme. It works perfectly, and quite frankly looks a lot better on general principle.

Oh, my. That looks quite awful on my machine.

If it works for other people, though ... yay them!

[KevinH]

So based on your tests and that arch linux wiki, it seems there are a number of minor changes we could make to the Linux sigil start-up script to force fusion as the style (or force one of the other working styles).

The arch linux site lists the following:

QGtkStyle - the one that seems to have problems
QGnomePlatform - for all gnome based systems
Breeze - default for KDE Plasma systems
Adwaita - new default gnome theme

and the ones built into Qt itself (Fusion).

From other reports it seems Adwaita and Fusion are known to work.

But given DiapDealer's opinion of Fusion - many people may not like it! ;-)

So I am not sure how we should handle this. The bug is not in Sigil and not in Qt. It is in a Qt Linux added theme. Calibre forces an adjusted Fusion theme to work around it.

What is the best way for Sigil to handle this?

FWIW - we can use QApplication::style() to get back the name of the style that the system defaults to on Linux and then compare it against a list of known good styles and if not a known good style force either Fusion or Adwaita depending on availability on that system.

Linux people - what would be best here?

KevinH

Originally Posted by eschwartz

As a Qt app, you can simply use `sigil -style Fusion` to force the fusion theme. It works perfectly, and quite frankly looks a lot better on general principle.

I might even be persuaded to start caring about themes at the rate things are going. I've always been a mostly oblivious user of themes and fonts and stuff but things are reaching a tipping point...

[KevinH]

Another way to handle this for Linux users is just do nothing but document that certain combinations of Sigil (and Calibre) won't work well with certain Linux theme/styles and then add a link on Sigil-Ebook.com or here pointing toward eschwartz's workaround way to launch sigil to prevent the issues.

Maybe that would be simpler?

KevinH

[varlog]

Originally Posted by KevinH

...
So DiapDelaer, Doitsu, eschwartz, and varlog, what desktop/theme are you using with your builds?
...

Ubuntu-Gnome with Adwaita.

[varlog]

Tried Fusion: it works... I don't like it .
So as Linux man I don't know the answer - only that forcing Fusion is something which won't agree with some of us.

[DiapDealer]

Actually ... I think it probably looks awful because I don't think I have any of those themes available.

I think Sigil built using the official Qt download has limited options for what themes are going to work. There's only one shared library in the Official Qt 5.4.2's plugins/platformthemes directory-- and that's libgtk2.so. I have no real idea what the connection between a platformtheme plugin and themes actually IS, but I would think they would be connected.


As such, I'm not really sure there's much we can do. Those who have other themes available can try them. We could have an environment variable override to make it a little easier for users to experiment, but they're still going to need to know what they have available to them first. And in that case, they'd probably be able to modify the launch-script themselves anyway.

[eschwartz]

Forcing a style is not an optimum solution... the Gtk project should do a better job at not breaking everything in sight.

And QGtkStyle tries to mimic the current Gtk theme -- which in my case was Adwaita.
Adwaita is not actually a huge problem... this Adwaita theme plugin for Qt is non-issueful.

...

The answer is that linux themes should, but don't, Just Work.
And QGtkStyle might work under certain conditions, but it sure isn't guaranteed... so an actual known working theme is to be preferred rather than some unholy translation engine as is the default on some popular desktops.

We can now proceed to bicker over theme preferences.

[KevinH]

Originally Posted by varlog

Ubuntu-Gnome with Adwaita.

Then problem is even stranger. Linux Mint Cinamon with Adwaita and Qt 5.4.2 works according to DiapDealer's tests. But you are saying that Ubuntu-GNome with Adwaita and Qt 5.5.1 does NOT work. But eschwartz's version of Adwaita (see his link) does not have issues.

If that is true the only guaranteed QStyle to work on Linux seems to be the built-in Qt one ("fusion").

I wonder what QStyle - Doitsu's ClearLooks theme uses?

What a mess!

KevinH