On Sat, 22 Jan 2005 21:45:45 -0800, Bryce Harrington wrote:
I'm really glad he brought this up - this is something I too have felt similarly about.
I have felt that the best approach for us would be to use SVG as the originating syntax, but render to png or bmp, and load those. From my perspective the benefit would be in load times; I think they'd have other benefits as well.
Actually the main problem is that icons have to be redrawn for small sizes. It doesn't matter when or with what you do the scaling, SVGs generally just don't scale well to 16x16 type sizes. Jimmac seems these days to draw icons by hand in the Gimp for small sizes, and then provide an SVG as well for larger sizes.
Loading time is usually a non-issue here, SVG icons usually load faster than PNGs do anyway because of the overhead of the gzip compression (or that is what I have read, strange but true).
If you want to optimise loading time then I have a bunch of tips on that, it's kind of a pet hate of mine too (not Inkscape specifically, just apps in general). Working closely with MS Office and Internet Explorer, both of which start much faster than the native equivalents, has taught me quite a bit about how to make programs start up fast ;)
thanks -mike