RFC: Wine Icons

[Joel Holdsworth]

Hi Juan,

> The problem that I see with the new SVG icon support is that we use
> icotool to create the small-size icons from the SVG when the SVG is
> available.  This rarely works well.  I think we need to maintain
> hand-drawn small-size icons, and optionally use SVG to generate
> larger-size (larger than 32x32) icons.

You're absolutely right.

I'm the GUI maintainer for Lumiera, and we're generating our icons from
SVGs. Each icon has to be specially adopted for each of the standard
small sizes. We've adopted the "one canvas" icon workflow that Tango
artists seem to be working toward. This is a video demonstrating the
technique: http://blip.tv/file/1075329

Basically it involves drawing a basic icon, then tweaking it so that it
looks good for different sizes. The SVG file is then "rigged" by putting
in invisible bounding boxes marked with XML metadata (this can all be
done in inkscape). We then have a python script* that then walks through
the SVG, rendering all bounding boxes that it finds marked with the
metadata. 

Here's an example of one of our SVGs:
http://www.lumiera.org/gitweb?p=lumiera/joel;a=blob_plain;f=icons/svg/tool-arrow.svg;h=3f0b72102bc3fe846eaedecb2d1ffabe82610aec;hb=master

As you can see, the icon has been tweaked to look good at 48x48, 32x32,
22x22 (24x24 is also produced from this size), and 16x16. The "One
Canvas Workflow" makes it very easy to make consistent changes instead
of having to keep hundreds of different files in synch. 

> You might try bugging Herve, as he's been redrawing all the icons.

I find that a bit alarming. I'm sure he's working very hard, and doing
good stuff, but I don't think Wine should be redrawing anything. Not
when we have Tango around - it's designed to try create some consistency
through standardisation. IMO standards are really good! - we use them if
we possibly can.


Joel


* see here:
http://www.lumiera.org/gitweb?p=lumiera/joel;a=blob;f=admin/render-icon.py;h=26bdb36535fb70464b1db5d217d007d571519db6;hb=master
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