Hi folks, I tried to start tweaking inkscape icons so it's less of a blur but stumbled on some obstacles.
As per some discussion on the #inkscape channel I was convinced I could use ~/.inkscape/icons/ to store PNG icons with filenames corresponding to the icons.svg object ids or the old XPM icon set. However this doesn't appear to have any effect.
Failing that, I tried doing them in vector. While ~/.inkscape/icons/icons.svg does seem to override the global icons, I'm puzzled about the size. The icons in the toolbar, nor the icons in the menus seem to match the 1:1 zoom of icons.svg thus any effort trying to position elements to the raster grid are useless. My 16x16px icon got scaled down to about 10px in the toolbar. What's the magic here?
I'm still convinced that for small resolutions such as the toolbar and definitely menu icons, bitmap icons will take less effort to draw. Even if you do them in vector, you still need to make sure the objects align well to the grid to render sharp. That means either having menu and toolbar render at the same size or doing every icon twice anyway. [1]
I see the usefulness of SVG icons, phasing them in gnome icon theme, but for tiny resolutions they don't work without pixel-perfect positioning.
[1] - More on this here: http://primates.ximian.com/~jimmac/blog/Artwork/SVG-NG/
cheers