Fix the "Ouch, these colors burns my eyes" problems

[TheElf]

A lot of users use colors in mirc, which is a good thing when you run a game online, yet it is a bad thing when a line is unreadable on your backgrounds because someone used wrong color. Even worse if it just hurts your eyes and you have to watch it for some time. But what can you do with it? First things first, you should understand a few things: A lot of people use very different color settings, and their monitors are different as well, you cannot expect everyone towrite lines that looks great on your side unless you remove all the color information or make sure your palette enforces it. The later option is the better, except, it still doesn't solve the problem when someone uses your background color as his text color. You can use some small tricks to protect yourself from this problem: Use an image background, and make sure all the colors provide a readable result over your background. But how do you do it?

The first rule: Plain mirc supports a good solution, and if your script doesn't support it, you probably have reasons to drop the script for your main clients. Bots can still use it. As you heard you need a background image you can make in any graphic program, it should be small and filled with a single color. Right click on the quickbar button for a window, go to background, and use the Select... option, select your new image. In the same background menu you should be able to select the fill option. Also in the same menu, you can use the set default option. With this you have your background picture ready. But even if you did choose a nice color some of the mirc standard text colors can look real bad on it. This is where you will adjust them. Hit ALT+K and see the mirc color picker in action. Probably you used it when you set your background color and all the text colors, and wonder why I have to explain it again. The reason is easy: Most people haven't tried to right click on the small color boxes on the lower part of the page, but you will.

As you see the windows color picker comes online and you can also define custom colors with rgb values for everything. All you need is to make sure your luminosity levels are different from the luminosity of your background. And your text should be readable in most cases. Of course you can fine tune each and every color till it looks good on your new background, and set up the colors of various line types later. It is this easy and with this you can make sure you won't have problems with colored text.

[nobara]

Thanks Elf, as a person with colorblindess this helped, I remember that you once told how to strip all colors from mirc, can you add this to your post?

[TheElf]

Yes, there are two ways if I remember well /strip +c is one and the other is to set it in mirc options.

[Patricia]

I personally enjoy themes which keep everything to just one or two colors. they usually come with scripts, or can be downloaded just about anywhere scripts can be found.

[TheElf]

2 colors with some shades of them?

[Patricia]

if you like yes.. and using KDE's theme packs, you an create your own too if you have the patience. i think it's called KDE.

[sdamon]

its MDX or something.
KDE is the K desktop Envrionment which only runs on windows with some persuasion. (Its a graphical user interface for *nix systems)

[ToNyOmAn]

MDX has nothing to do with themes (if you weren't talking about mIRCDX, then sorry)

Originally Posted by sdamon

its MDX or something.
KDE is the K desktop Envrionment which only runs on windows with some persuasion. (Its a graphical user interface for *nix systems)

errrr....ummmm.

Well technically X(11/86Free) is the GUI for *nix systems. KDE is just one of many desktop enviroments.

[sdamon]

that was the quick "omit everything thats uneeded at the moment" explination. and mdx is a DLL that stores all theme info into files...so :P