Icon theme specification: Standardizing icon names

[Frans Englich]

On Monday 11 October 2004 15:10, Owen Taylor wrote:
> Some very quick comments. It's really great you are working on this.
>
> On Sat, 2004-10-09 at 21:50 +0000, Frans Englich wrote:
> > Hello everyone,
> >
> > Attached is a patch which standardizes 1048 icon names, compiled from the
> > ~2050 icons which KDE and GNOME in all houses. While that sounds like a
> > lot, and bizarre for that matter too, the important question is where
> > this is heading, what we want to achieve, and why.
>
> Does it make sense to standardize this many icons? Should we try to
> standardize a smaller subset that really obviously make sense ...
> creating an icon theme with 1048 icons is pretty prohibitive.

It is many, but it is what GNOME and KDE needs. It is gnome with the oo.o 
icons which pops the roof. The question is, since all these icons should be 
spec'ed at somepoint anyway, it's perhaps just as good to do it at once. In 
the GNOME case the icons already exists. The trouble of achieving conformance 
is organizational; to play diplomacy and contact projects, surf repositories, 
and get all these icons collected in one place -- and with the right 
names(that diagnosis tool is a must have). The problem is, if we go for 
something small, it won't work with GNOME, for example. I'm not convinced in 
this matter and I'll happily see someone clear my confusion.

>
> > * GNOME have "rtl" versions of some icons, for example "stock_revert" and
> > "stock_revert_rtl". The rtl images are horizontally flipped, for bidi
> > languages I assume. KDE doesn't have this. How should this be handled?
> > Should the spec dictate the lookup code to be "load *_rtl version if it
> > exists and if bidi language is used"? This means a stat for each loaded
> > icon. Would it be better to have a directive in the icon data file, which
> > simply told the icon loader to flip the image? (simpler, smaller icon
> > theme, among other things)
>
> Some of the GNOME icons are *not* simply flips. (Imagine an icon
> with text in, say.) 

Ok. Then the spec will basically say "if any icon should look differnt in rtl 
mode, create another icon and append '_rtl' to its name."

> To make icons themes  perform acceptably it is 
> basically required to have a precomputed index files (Hopefully someone
> will be posting the format we are experimenting with for GTK+ here in
> the next couple of days), so checking for icon existence doesn't mean an
> extra syscall.

That sounds very interesting.


Cheers,

		Frans