[Tango-artists] Tryin' to figure out what to do

[Rodney Dawes]

On Sat, 2008-08-09 at 21:26 +0100, J-R DUBOC wrote:
> Hi all,
> thank you all for your answers,
> 
> > As far as pending designs, I'm not sure if there is anyplace to
> check. The Tango set in its
> > current state is pretty complete. Although not as complete as the
> Gnome version.
> 
> Can you explain to me what the difference is between the Tango set and
> the Gnome version ? How would one contribute to that ? Do we need to
> be in contact with the Gnome team ?

Due to license issues, and to allay any of the "Tango is just GNOME
trying to push their ways on us" FUD, we have to keep the two themes
separate. But now that much of the FUD is gone, and we are working on
changing the licensing structure of Tango, much of the work will be
able to flow back into the GNOME theme.

Either way, the maintainers/artists for both themes are basically the
same people. Us.

> >I don't think their is a set collection of tutorials to design GNOME
> icons... They are packaged >with the icon-naming-utils to fit with the
> Gnome and KDE icon specifications. Then a simple >config script is
> included and they are archived.
> 
> All right, see this is the part that is (to me) not so clear in the
> Tango Icon Theme Guidelines (although it might be better suited for
> another page on the Tango project website).
> The best thing would be to record a step-to-step guide as how to
> integrate your icon in the system itself, in other words : how the
> heck do I get to see my work on a real desktop interface ?

I think perhaps "Icon Theme" being in the title of that page is a bit
misleading. While we have the tango-icon-theme package, and it is an
implementation of both the Tango style, and the Icon Naming
Specification, the guidelines themselves are meant to be a bit broader
than tango-icon-theme. They are for any icon theme really, or even just
some specific icons in an application, such as several GNOME
applications have.

Seeing your work in action really depends on what kind of work you're
doing. One of our goals for example is to have branded application icons
be shipped with the applications themselves. The method of installation
for those, or for app-specific icons used in the app's interface, are
a tad bit different than making a full icon theme.

If you want to create icons in a theme, and place them in a theme
though, you can of course read the Icon Theme and Icon Naming
specifications which are found on http://freedesktop.org/.

These two specifications provide the information for creating an
icon theme. The icon-naming-utils package exists to create compatibility
symlinks for applications which have not yet fully migrated to the
naming specification, to be able to use the icons still. Setting up
a theme to use this is a bit more complicated, and it is designed for
themes which are to be shipped as a source package where you do the
normal ./configure && make install routine for installing the package.


If you have more specific questions though, you can ask them here,
or in the IRC channel #tango on irc.freenode.net, and someone will
answer them.

-- dobey