Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!ucbvax!hplabs!hp-pcd!hpcvlx!jbb
From: jbb@hpcvlx.HP.COM (Jim B. Byers)
Newsgroups: comp.windows.x
Subject: Re: MOTIF: color vs b&w
Message-ID: <100920096@hpcvlx.HP.COM>
Date: 4 Aug 89 21:28:42 GMT
References: <180@sunquest.UUCP>
Organization: Hewlett-Packard Co., Corvallis, OR, USA
Lines: 50


>I have heard that Motif's 3-D appearance looks
>great in color but pretty poor in black and white.  

Not true, I have been using the hpwm (HP windows) manager
and applications based on the HP widget set for many months.
These look and behave surprisingly like Motif :-).

Currently I am running mwm - the Motif window manager- 
and am very pleased with the appearance of these on my
mono screen.  

Generally what you want is to use a grey or pattern root window,
white top shadow color, black bottom shadow color.   A more
pleasing setting may be to use some of the dithered patterns
for the topShadowPixmap settings, bottomShadowPixmap settings
etc.  The 3D effect is really very good.

These settings need to be made in a suitable way such as 
defaults files etc.  If no system defaults, .Xdefaults etc
are present the generic Motif window manager or applications
may not be to your taste.  The Motif toolkit does not force an
application to provide good default monochrome behavior, but makes
it easy to do.  In other words it is easy to use dithered shadows 
because they are easy to specify and the functionality is there
but a developer does not have to implement it if they don't want
to.   

BTW there are some good ways to make the 3D effect look crummy
on monochrome.  For example, provide an .Xdefaults, app-defaults
etc. file to an unsuspecting user.  Make sure that it refers to 
lots of colors.  The defaults behavior of an application will
be overridden by these settings.  The user will see lots of 
flat looking stuff at best and black on black (or white on white)
at worst.  A better idea is to provide some defaults for monochrome
under a separate name.  For example, provide settings for mono_mwm
and have the user run mwm -name mono_mwm ...... when (s)he starts
up a program (mwm in this example).  This can be important because
many people provide system defaults on the hub of a diskless 
cluster.  Every node uses the same system defaults unless they have
there own .Xdefaults.

In short, the 3D effect is very good on monochrome.  Developers and
system administrators need to make sure that they take advantage
of it and do not override it.

Jim Byers
Corvallis Information Systems

I love those sharp, crisp mono displays with lots of real estate.