How to make Zorin text be black color

General Help
1

Techinfo: Zorin-OS-16.3-Core-64-bit
installed via YUMI/ventoy of Zorin 16.3 Live
to external NVME SSD, attached to Thinkpad X1 Carbon G3 (2015) which usually is running Windows 7 (shocking).

I am testing Zorin Core, if all goes well, intend to 'upgrade' to the Pro.
What I dearly wish though is to be able to read the screen more easily.

I am using the Light Theme (which I prefer, I cannot look at dark themes for more than a few minutes before my eyesight waters, sorry.)
Layout Top Left light style. Theme Light.
But the text in the various Zorin configuration screens is medium gray on light gray background. VERY DIFFICULT to actually READ.

How can I set the system font COLOR to be actual true black instead of medium gray?

I tried the High Contrast -- NO, that is not what I want a just black and white everything. (I've worked with sight-disabled people in support, so I didn't really expect this to work for me.)

Large text helps somewhat, though the text is still medium gray.

I found the Zorin Appearance Fonts text screen choice.
That is not a true solution, as the various fonts were all still medium gray and only bold helped somewhat (though again, still a gray font color).

I don't know what the designer obsession with gray on gray is all about, but it makes it hard to use the computer.

I know from Dedoimedo Linux article that some distros can be altered to have a true Black font (or foreground) color.
How can I make that happen in Zorin?

(P.S. I did some forum topic searching here on this, but found nothing that would tell me how to set the gray font color to become black color.)

2

You can set all text to black using a custom gtk.css file.
In your home directory, bap the keyboard shortcut ctrl+h
Now, the hidden system files (home) will be revealed.
You can re-hide with the same keyboard shortcut.

Navigate to /.config/gtk-3.0/ and create a new file named gtk.css
Save the file.
Open that file and paste in the following:

 @define-color theme_fg_color #000000;
 @define-color theme_text_color #000000;
 @define-color fg_color #000000;
 @define-color text_color #000000;
 @define-color selected_fg_color #000000;
 @define-color tooltip_fg_color #000000;
 @define-color theme_tooltip_fg_color #000000;

Save the file
Reload the desktop (keyboard shortcut alt+F2 and enter in just r and hit the enter key) to test changes.

2 Likes
3

Thanks Aravisian, I will give that a go.

1 Like