Direction arrows.

James Richard Tyrer tyrerj at acm.org
Sat Jun 23 23:10:38 PDT 2007


In KDE3, we have 4 arrow icons:

	up
	forward
	down
	back

That move step wise and the corresponding 4 arrow icons:

	top
	finish
	bottom
	start

that go all the way in that direction.

We also have two additional icons:

	next
	previous

that have a non-sequential usage.

Perhaps these are not the best names, but they seem to have worked OK.

The Icon Naming Standard appears to name there (in the same order):

	go-up
	go-next
	go-down
	go-previous

for the single steps, and:

	go-top
	go-last
	go-bottom
	go-first

for the actions going all the way on the respective directions.

Perhaps these names are better, perhaps not, but that isn't the issue. 
It doesn't make a lot of difference what we call them as long as we have 
the 8 icons for the 8 concepts.

The first problem I see is that we have no new icon names for the KDE3 
concepts:

	next
	previous

and the fact that we have used these names for something else (which is 
OK), doesn't mean that we have taken care of these two concepts.  It 
does, however, tend to complicate discussion of the question. :-\

We have in KDE4:

	find-next
	find-previous

which don't appear to be in the current Spec..  These are OK, however, 
they are subsets of the KDE3 icons:

	next
	previous

since the icons: "find-*" are only for the find operation and there are 
other non-sequential operations that require: "next" & "previous".  A 
good example of this is Adobe Acrobat Reader.  On the bottom toolbar, we 
have (by tooltip) LtoR:

	First Page
	Previous Page
	Next Page
	Last Page
	-----------------
	Previous View
	Next View

The Icon Naming Spec currently lacks icon names for the last two.

Should we call these:

	view-previous
	view-next

of are there better ideas?

-- 
JRT

	






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