GNOMEPrint, Icons, and shades of InSight..

[Bowie Poag <bjp primenet com>]

> 
> Someone else had pointed out that we need to have an effective way of
> having scalable icons, possibly a new file format.  This discussion of the
> GNOMEprint reminded me that this is important, and here's my proposal.
  (....stuff about PNG deleted for space..)
> First, we define a set of allowable icon sizes (in pixels).  A particular 
> icon need not support all of the list, but it must supply a contiguous
> block (eg. all the lines between 48x48 and 8x8), even if some of the
> sizes are left blank (here's where PNG would come in handy). I propose the
> following list:
> 512x512
> 384x384
> 256x256
> 192x192 (From here up will probably be rare, but it hurts nothing to
> 128x128  support it)
> 96x96
> 64x64
> 48x48
> 32x32
> 24x24
> 16x16
> 12x12
> 8x8
> 
> An argument could be made for adding 20x20, 40x40, 80x80, 160x160 and
> 320x320 sizes, adding them would just play with the equations a bit.
> However, I don't think those sizes are critical, the list I gave would be
> a good enough array of pictures.

This is precisely what we were doing in InSight. We were going to have a
scaling engine and icon cache that would have used 64x64 base tiles, and
converted them on the fly up to as high as 80x80, and as low as 8x8 for
usage on the destop.  After conversion, they would be cached, in the hope
that they would later be used by the system. Theres alot I could talk
about here, but I'll stop for now.

I *dont* propose we do the same thing with GNOME, however.

Bowie