Question

I have a multi-platform Qt application with a custom palette that we have already set up to produce the look that we want. The palette was set on the top level widget and so this was inherited by all of the child widgets.

I then wanted to dynamically change the text colour of some QPushButtons. Searching around for the best way to do this, I began reading about Style Sheets which I didn’t know that much about previously. These seemed to be a good option for changing the look of the push buttons and they did this. However, as soon as I set the text colour using a style sheet, the widget palette jumped to the default. It soon became obvious that style sheets are not compatible with custom palettes and it wasn’t possible to mix the two. Most of the info that I found suggested that style sheets should be used rather than custom palettes because, among other things, style sheets offer guarantees across platforms and looks which palette fiddling does not.

From this, it seemed like a good idea to convert my custom palette into a style sheet and set it on the top level widget. Then I would easily be able to change just some parameters of certain child widgets using sub-style-sheets. The problem is that the palette contains many colours that we have set that do not appear to have a style sheet equivalent. Eg, Light, Midlight and Dark. Without being able to set these colours I wasn’t able to produce the same look using style sheets as I previously had with the customised palette.

I would like to know if there is a simple way to convert a customised palette into a style sheet or whether there is some documentation to describe the equivalent style sheet settings for each palette colour. I have done searches on google, stackoverflow and the Qt reference docs but have come up short.

Thanks for any info.

ps. I solved my original problem by dynamically modifying the ButtonText attribute of the palette for the QPushButtons. But I would still rather use style sheets instead if possible without changing the main look of my application.

Answer 1

QColor.name() is the hex string for that color. If you want to convert to a stylesheet, just run through all the roles in your palette and print the .name() of that color. You can then find the corresponding stylesheet properties and pseudo states to set the hex colors to.

One thing you may find frustrating from switching from palettes to stylesheets is that CSS
does not allow the use of variables, so you’ll have to use the hex string everywhere, rather than just defining named colors and using those.