Bug: Printing using a dark theme reverse colors on print

[pmk65]

Changing the colors of the editor area using a dark Theme like "Base 16: Twilight Colour Scheme" or "Base 16: Ocean Colour Scheme" affects printing of documents.

Instead of printing BLACK text on WHITE background, ALL text is printed in WHITE on BLACK background!

See screenshot: http://i.imgur.com/1elbMut.png

[Aivars]

I see, I'll add this to bugs list.

[pmk65]

*Bump*

The problem still exists in current version of WeBuilder.
Just try making a "Print Preview"

[Aivars]

The problem is... how to work around this? If we just set background to white then white and very light text colors wouldn't be visible. Just enforcing every text to be black would annoy customers who use dark-on-white color schemes and are used to their printouts matching the syntax highlighter.

[pmk65]

As it is now, it will only show a nice output IF the background color IS true WHITE (#FFFFFF)
Any other background color will be printed, making the output look ugly and hard to read.

So you could check if the current background color is set to #FFFFFF.
If TRUE, then print as in color (As it does now)
If FALSE, then print in B/W.

That would at make the output usable. (And I usually just want the code printed in B/W anyway.)
Currently there's no way to print it in true B/W either, only in greyscale tones.

The best option would be have 2 "Print" methods:
1) True B/W (background white and text black)
2) Color (where background color ALWAYS is set to white before printing. Then if the user want's color output, he/she will have to select a Color Scheme that is printable.)

Currently I have to open the documents I want to print in a 2nd program, or switch to a Color Scheme with white background. (Both options are equally annoying)

[Will Fastie]

I do not print much, so I just bumped into this problem. Even though I do not print much, it is essential that printing be available when needed.

I propose having two profiles, one for the screen and one for the printer.

As a stopgap measure, I propose using a white background for all printing even if the colors are somewhat faint. This is preferable to the current situation, which has two problems:

• The black background is only printed under text, not across the entire page. I find this extremely hard to read.
• The black background consumes a lot of ink/toner.

I tried turning off Print Highlighted in Options but that resulted in black and white printing only, with the line numbers printed light gray on black. I'm looking for color printing.

I note that this thread has been around for quite some time, suggesting the Blumentals does not give it much priority. I think this needs to be fixed.

Note: Visual Studio Code has no print capability at all. However, there is a VSC extension called PrintCode that prints by converting the code into HTML and launcing a browser to print it. That would be another acceptable compromise until this can be fixed properly in RAPID.

[pmk65]

Note: Visual Studio Code has no print capability at all. However, there is a VSC extension called PrintCode that prints by converting the code into HTML and launcing a browser to print it. That would be another acceptable compromise until this can be fixed properly in RAPID.

That's pretty much the same I ended up doing in my BW Print plugin. But unfortunately ALL browsers suck when it comes to printing.
There's a lot of HTML/CSS printing features, but browsers doesn't currently support the same features. Here's a Gist example of a CSS printing stylesheet I made a while ago. If you use that for printing in browsers, you will notice that some of the CSS is ignored by some browsers, but work in others.

[Aivars]

The best thing to do if you're using dark background is to go to menu Options -> Preferences -> Other and check Black & White. That eliminates all colors but it does leave bold texts bold and it will always print on white background thus saving the toner.

[Hans Meiser]

Just a general question on this topic:
When opening a XSC file, the colors are represented as integers. How are those integers calculated, because I can't see how it's done. I only know that its from 0 upwards.
The reason I want to know is, I would like to make a simple solution to generate themes, because right now it's a pain in the ass to jump and copy&paste between all those options in the settings menu. So, any hint on that would be appreciated.

Edit:
Never mind, just found out, that with PHPs hexdec and a reversed RGB value I can get those integer values.

[pmk65]

Colors are in BGR decimal format. (I wrote a PHP script to convert all the Base16 color schemes to WeBuilder format a while ago)

So a decimal number like 4538169 would translate to #453F39 hexadecimal.

B = 45
G = 3F
R = 39

To get the RGB value, you swap the values, like this:

39 3F 45 = #393F45

Here's the PHP conversion function I made (Bidirectional, so it can convert rgb2bgr and bgr2rgb in either hex or dec):

Code: Select all

	function rgb2bgr($val, $hex = 1) { 
		$val = is_string($val) ? hexdec($val) : $val;
		$val = (($val & 0x0000FF) << 16 | ($val & 0x00FF00) | ($val & 0xFF0000) >> 16);
		return $hex ? sprintf('#%x', $val) : $val;
	}