icon-slicer 0.3

[Owen Taylor]

On Sat, 2003-06-28 at 14:08, Fredrik Höglund wrote:
> On Thursday 26 June 2003 21:03, Owen Taylor wrote:
> > The initial release of icon-slicer is now available for
> > download from:
> >
> > http://www.freedesktop.org/software/icon-slicer/
> >
> > What is icon slicer:
> >
> > Icon slicer is a command line utility for generating icon themes
> > and libXcursor cursor themes by cutting up "sheets" containing
> > many images according to an XML theme description file.
> 
> [snip]
> 
> Looking at this app reminds me of something I've been thinking
> about while working on Xcursor support for KDE.
> 
> We currrently have a number of non-standard cursors that are
> duplicated in the various toolkits, such as the DnD cursors.
> 
> I think we need to make an effort to standardize on the
> filenames used for these common cursors, so they can be shared
> by the different desktops and toolkits.
> 
> This isn't limited just to toolkit level cursors of course. Many
> of the cursors used by applications like the Gimp could also be
> used by other applications like Sodipodi, Karbon etc.
>
> I think that creating a new cursor standard for those cursors
> would be important, especially to those developers that don't
> target a specific desktop with their applications, but still need
> to know that the cursors they use are available in the cursor
> themes designed for the desktops their applications are
> being used in.
> 
> The old X11 cursor font is after all mostly a collection of random
> images that don't meet the needs of modern applications,
> and is IMO no longer suitable as a standard for this.

There is recent discussion of updated standard sets of cursors 
from:

http://mail.gnome.org/archives/gtk-devel-list/2003-June/msg00104.html

It's certainly clear that the old X set is both too big and too
small and needs to be replaced with a set that is chosen on a more
rational level than "look at this neat image I came up with of a
space shuttle".

When you get to things like tool cursors from drawing programs, then
I'm not sure you can enumerate all the cursors in advance. For that,
we'd probably just have to have a registry somewhere so that cursors
that were the same used the same name. (*)

Regards,
					Owen

(*) personally, I think tool cursors probably should be generally
avoided - we can now do semi-transparent brush-shaped cursors, which 
are vastly more useful.