Tango Icon Questions

[Joel Holdsworth]

Ok,

We seem to have two questions that need to be resolved before the tango
icons can be merged.

First: The SVGs.

A little background on how I make the icon set: The icon set has been
assembled from different sources of artwork. Some my own, some from
other people, so there's a certain amount of variation in the formats
that I've received. In every case, I have had to do a certain amount of
work to produce the 9 or 10 sub-images of an ico.

Rather like fonts, in icon art, the size of a pixel is significant
relative to the size of graphical elements. This effect is particularly
pronounced at the smaller sizes: 16x16 and 22x22. At smaller sizes,
manual intervention in the vector artwork becomes increasingly
necessary. Graphical elements have to be tweaked to align to pixel
boundaries or resized, rearranged, or removed altogether.

Low colour depths pose further problems. In 8-bit icons we only have
1-bit transparency. Drop shadows must be removed, and the icon must be
adjusted in a raster editor to remove jagginess in the boundaries. These
are exported as PNGs, and in some cases I kept the GIMP xcf.bz2s.

4-bit icons are still harder. Here the icon has to be so radically
adjusted, that the original SVG really only forms a template for a piece
of pixel art. I tend to do this work with the wine glass hidden in the
SVG rendering, and then overlay a pre-rendered wine glass. Again, these
are expored as PNGs, and in most cases I kept the GIMP xcf.bz2s.

In an ideal world, we would have one SVG source file, which would be
versioned in Git, which we would render to different sizes and depths as
part of the build process. I hope you can see how this would be
impractical because of the amount of manual raster work that has been
needed.

The only build scripts that I have are scripts that automatically
compile my PNGs into ICOs, but this step wouldn't really help the
project much, because the PNG is no less a binary blob than the ICO.

To further compound the issue, I've found 2 bugs in icotool that cause
it to create ICOs that are formatted incorrectly, and cause Wine to
misbehave. For my ICO scripts I wrote a simple tool called "fix-icon"
which tweaks the files, to correct the 2 types of problem. I've tried to
contact the author of icotool about this, but as yet haven't got a
response.

So in conclusion, I think the best thing would be for me to tidy my
icons project folder, and submit that to git or wine-pub-ftp. I think we
need to accept that some images are PNG, some SVG and some XCF.BZ2,
depending on the original source, and I don't think we can do automated
render steps as part of the build.


The other question is about attribution. By now, ALL the icons have had
some input from me in one way or another; they're all a derivative work.

I'm planning to just submit the icons in the current round, as shown on
the website: http://www.airwebreathe.org.uk/wine-icon/ - no bitmaps this
round, just shell32.dll, user32.dll, and Programs icons.

The sources of these are:

      * Tango Base - Public Domain
      * Scott Ritchie - oic_winlogo.ico - the Wine Glass
      * Jakub Steiner - oic_bang.ico - GPLd, but I have an e-mail of him
        agreeing to relicense
      * Ulisse Perusin - winemine - GPLd, but have e-mail agreeing a
        relicense.
      * Joel Holdsworth - my original work - LGPLd.

What would be the best way for us to attribute these? I guess we need to
do things properly with regard to licensing, but I think the authors are
all quite easy-going.

Any thoughts

Thanks
Joel