Bug: sometimes white text is unreadable #12

Activity

1. asterizk commented on Sep 28, 2026

   

   asterizk

   on Sep 28, 2026

   Last edited by asterizk

   OwnerAuthor

   More actions

   Another, more extreme example from 2026-09-28 ("Cosmic Latte: The Average Color of the Universe"). The APOD image is almost a solid #FFF8E7, so the white title and body text are nearly invisible.

   

   Cause: in starhop.py, the title is drawn with a hard-coded fill=(255, 255, 255). The body multiline_text call passes no fill, so it uses Pillow's default ink, which is white in RGB mode. There's no outline, shadow or backing panel, and nothing checks how bright the image is behind the text.

   Possible fixes (can be combined):

   1. Choose the text color from brightness. Crop the area under the title and body, measure its average brightness (e.g. ImageStat.Stat(region.convert("L")).mean), and draw in black if the background is bright, white if it's dark.
   2. Outline the text. Pass stroke_width and a contrasting stroke_fill to text() and multiline_text(), so the text stays readable on any background, including busy ones like White frame around original image yields only partially readable caption #6.
   3. Put a see-through panel behind the caption. Draw a semi-transparent dark rectangle behind the text block.

   Also, pass fill explicitly to the body text, not just the title. That keeps the two consistent and may be related to #5.

   Test case: 2026-09-28 works well for a regression test, because the image is nearly one uniform light color.