On 2009-May-18 , at 02:06 , Jon A. Cruz wrote:
Some needed code has been restored, but the scaling behavior probably won't reappear until the hicolor contents are removed from the build. For testing, you can just find the hicolor directory that contains all the external icons and rename it to something else.
Indeed that solves the scaling issue (well sort of, since rendering the vectors at a size they were not intended for makes them look funny, but that's a whole other debate).
Not following sizing from the GTK+ theme settings is one key thing that the external icons are blocking.
The good news, however, is that the changes Krzysztof did included one that cleared the last bugs complicating external themes. So now all those files that are under "hicolor" can be dropped in to user directories or system ones as an external theme. So now these can be delivered independent of the official Inkscape release install.
I guess by "external icons" you mean getting them from a directory with bitmap icons at different sizes, as all other GTK apps do. So, if I understand correctly, removing the hicolor dir (hence the external icons) falls back on rendering them on the fly from the SVG source (as was done before). This currently has several "drawbacks": - it uses the old icon theme, not the new tango-like one on which many people worked to make it better. I don't want to start another flamewar between tango/old theme, but I am just saying that switching from one icon rendering method to the other should not change the theme. - it adds a lag to startup: 6-7 seconds with external icons, 11-12 without. And this is increased when the rest of the machine is busy already. I understand that icons have to be rendered from the SVG but was there not some kind of caching that Mental introduced? Doesn't it persist between startups?
So for both compatibility purposes (with the regular theming mechanism of GTK apps) and from a performance point of view, external icons seem better. The drawback is that they put more strain on the icon designers. But there is some kind of script that should allow to export all icons at all sizes from a common document by leveraging the export all groups feature of Inkscape.
So then, what is needed to have the external icons work properly? "Just" design some at bigger sizes (32 and 48) and export them together with the currently existing sizes (24, 16) in hicolor? If the tango icons look good as they are, then I guess the people that worked on them could scale and touch them up a bit at these large sizes to complete the icon set.
[Note: I am perfectly happy with 24 and 16 because we ship with a custom theme on OS X and I can set the sizes there (and I have a small screen so 24 and 16 are nice). But I guess people with external GTK themes and/or big screens might what bigger ones]
JiHO --- http://jo.irisson.free.fr/