Ambiance causes odd comboboxes in OpenOffice.org

[Pascal de Bruijn]

Binary package hint: light-themes

When using Ambiance or Radiance, the comboboxes (and most buttons) in OpenOffice.org look odd... It causes a kind of border around the comboboxes/buttons which shouldn't be there.

It gives a general sloppy feel to OpenOffice.org, the light-themes themes are the only ones that seem to be causing this effect in OpenOffice.org.

ProblemType: Bug
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 10.04
Package: light-themes 0.1.6.5
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 2.6.32-21.32-generic 2.6.32.11+drm33.2
Uname: Linux 2.6.32-21-generic x86_64
Architecture: amd64
Date: Thu Apr 22 21:23:49 2010
EcryptfsInUse: Yes
InstallationMedia: Ubuntu 10.04 "Lucid Lynx" - Beta amd64 (20100318)
PackageArchitecture: all
ProcEnviron:
 LANG=en_US.utf8
 SHELL=/bin/bash
SourcePackage: light-themes

[Vivek Kapoor (marquivon)]

Though the ambiance theme looks pretty good otherwise, but when Openoffice.org Writer opens up, not only the issue as mentioned by Pascal is there, but at the bottom there are black boxes covering all the options (as in the attached screenshot). Also, the rulers are covered with it and when you open Draw then everything looks boxy boxy.

The black border effect is more pronounced when Calc is opened. See the attached screenshot - the left and right arrow buttons and the tabs for the three worksheets are covered with jet black border. It isn't smooth and is too raw.

These black boxes make the entire interface less sophisticated as compared to say when you open Firefox or Evolution.

[Mo-Yu Mandy Zhou (zhou-mandy)]

I tried different themes with OpenOffice, and all of the themes with dark comboboxes and buttons have the same problem. I think it's an issue with OpenOffice, and not with the themes (unless there's a workaround?).

[Vivek Kapoor (marquivon)]

@Mandy - I'm not sure about that. I tried the theme "New wave" which comes by default, and it looks better than Ambiance. And I found it to be a comparatively darker theme, than say Clearlooks.

[Mo-Yu Mandy Zhou (zhou-mandy)]

@Vivek - The difference with New Wave is that the buttons are less rounded and there is a smaller amount of transparency around them, so if you look carefully, you'll see that while the theme still doesn't look as good as it does in other programs, the fact is less apparent because of the nature of the theme. I don't know if you can generalize to all dark themes with rounded buttons, though; it's just a conjecture.

[Vivek Kapoor (marquivon)]

@Mandy - could be true about the combo boxes. But apart from that, there are black border boxes that I'm referring to in the screenshot (attached in my earlier post), and jagged edges to Sheet 1, Sheet 2 & Sheet3 tabs, and lastly the the arrow keys in the Calc screenshot. That's not as much pronounced in New Wave.

[ubuntolo (ovitaerc)]

I don't know how the OOo GUI works and how much it can be tweaked to look similar to a native GTK+ one (no one proposed a GTK+ interface conversion project?), but with Ambiance OOo look quite ugly, just a bit better with Radiance, and little more with Clearlooks. OOo is a great suite, I use both for home and professional purposes, it's a real pity that it looks so bad, but I suppose we will have to live with that.

[Pascal de Bruijn (pmjdebruijn)]

OOo is already supposed to look more or less like native GTK+, except that Ambiance seems to break that somehow.

[Mo-Yu Mandy Zhou (zhou-mandy)]

I find OOo to be one of the apps that I use on a regular basis that looks least like native GTK ... it does fare better with some themes than others, though. I agree with ubuntolo that a project to convert OOo to a GTK interface would be wonderful; I don't think it's very likely to happen, though.

[Jean-Peer Lorenz (peer.loz)]

Here's another screenshot of buttons in OpenOffice Calc with dark, boxy border around them.

[Adolfo Jayme Barrientos (fitojb)]

Issues described in this bug have been fixed in LibreOffice 3.4.