Sorry for the for the late reply but I was busy being useful in other ways.
On Thu, 28 Sep 2006, Ronan Zeegers wrote:
Date: Thu, 28 Sep 2006 02:58:31 +0200 From: Ronan Zeegers <inkscape@...1494...> To: inkscape-devel@lists.sourceforge.net Subject: [Inkscape-devel] Tango style icons
Hello,
I'm working on a more tango like icons style for inkscape. The screenshot is here: http://www.ronanzeegers.com/inkscape/inkscape-tangoished-v0.5.png
Tango has eyecandy but the really important thing is the underlying icon specification. I really hope that work could happen at the same time as any switch to another icon set, we've had one switch already.
Now to the icons themselves. Consistency is good but you have made the retangle, star, and circle, all the same colour. I understand some people prefer all their icons to be almost monochrome (see the lastest version of Krita Paint in KOffice) but this was an intentional difference in Inkscape which Sodipodi didn't have and as far as I know there is nothing in Tango which should prevent you from having this differentiation.
There are larger problems with the icons I'm not sure any theme can solve, and thank you for bringing this to my attention to this specific taks and making me rethink it and reapply what I have learned. I would be very interested to print out the icons only and ask users to write down what they think the icon represents. A picture may be worth a thousand words but sometimes a word or two is all your really need. (Comic books provide both pictures and words, even better!) Only the most frequently used items should need toolbar icons, I wonder if both import/export bitmap are really all that frequent. More to the point if a user feels the need to hit those buttons over and over there has to be a better overall process for batch exporting bitmaps but I'm repeating myself on this topic. I can sort of understand the document properties (metadata) having toolbar icon but if the preferences need to be changed so often as to require a toolbar icon then the preferences are badly broken ("snap to grid" probably and a few others probably need to be moved back into the menus, was a nice idea but it didn't really work. Using the menu structure from Adobe/Macromedia might serve as a useful baseline if anyone is interested in trying to figure it out.)
Another issue with the logic of the icon metaphors - again not your fault - is that font family is represented with a big T and the text tool is represented with a big A. An icon or graphic to show _text_ kinda sucks in principle but it practice is it sometimes unavoidable. Using the letter T for text makes sense in English but not necessarily other languages, which is why the letter A is used instead. In rare cases applications implement a whole load of infrastructure to allow internationalisable icons for things like (B)old, (I)talic, (U)nderline. Abiword is one such application that has or at least had this infrastructure but once Abiword switched to the Gnome 2 icons it just used the letter A.
To answer another question (and if I recall correctly) the 24x24 icon size is a Tango thing, to try and bring Gnome closer in line with other platforms and avoid squishing and rescaling effects.
Sincerely
Alan Horkan
Inkscape http://inkscape.org Open Clip Art http://OpenClipArt.org