OSD symbols

[Rodney Dawes]

On Thu, 2009-12-10 at 21:01 +0000, Nuno Pinheiro wrote:
> this may be a very silly idea but i thought i should share, couldn't it make 
> sense to simply make a font with all the symbols you need, 
> 
> as i told you guys KDE is probably going to implement this type of icons 
> inside plasma specific theming, and use this as fall back... still a font 
> would do the job pretty well, i think :D I can be very wrong :D  

I don't think a font is the right solution. If the answer is to not have
things in the icon theme, then the better solution is to just draw the
things in code, since nobody is ever going to change them anyway at that
point. And if there is a need to, it's a simple change in code. Some
things are already in the Unicode table, btw. Other things aren't, and
so we wouldn't be able to reliably get the correct symbols from a font.
One might install another font that has completely different symbols
(could be letters in Klingon or something) in the same code page, and
we'd end up having some weird stuff in the UI where icons should be.

And icons at least allow us to have shinier icons when we don't want to
have monochrome icons for stuff. I really don't like the whole
monochrome icon thing. At least, I don't like it in the context of any
current APIs and panels where they get used.