Jon A. Cruz wrote:
But as of post-0.46 changes, you *can* theme Inkscape. It first and foremost looks to the system for icons, and only uses its internal ones if no system ones are present for that name. (...) And for a generic theme designer out there, Inkscape will happily go with any icons they've added in a standard themeing way. The single file is more for the Inkscape internal/built-in icons.
I think you mean that you can replace icons.svg in your home directory. This is not what I mean by "theming". I mean being able to replace the icons used in Inkscape simply by putting an appropriately named icon in my icon theme. Inkscape doesn't look in the current theme for anything except the three "legacy icons" specified in widgets/icon.cpp.
Also let me know if you might be interested in some XSLT to track and process such items.
Yes, some help on the front of automatically creating discrete SVG icons from the monolithic file could help. I planned to modify Inkscape's command line functionalities to provide this, but using an XSLT would be a better idea. The main problem is that icons.svg uses a lot of clones, but maybe they aren't such a problem in XSLT.
Did you check what the calls do? They do look to the system first, and then go to the internal as a fall-back. Try switching icon themes for the system and watch which icons change in our UI and which do not. Then look at a few of those changing ones to see what they are named. That should be a good starting point. If the builtin is only used as a fallback, then it's OK. But there's another thing: gtk_icon_theme_add_builtin_icon takes a GdkPixbuf, so effectively this is the same as using PNGs, but in the latter case they wouldn't have to be rendered at startup.
BTW, The "blurry icon issue" is caused by toolbars using 18x18 icons, which aren't standard, and the icons in icons.svg being designed for viewing at 16x16.
Regards, Krzysztof Kosiński