Re: SVG themes in GNOME2.4

["Daniel Farrell" <daniel farrells org>]

>> I personally think svg themes are pretty silly. I mean, they just take
>> more time to render (leading to bad performance). In the end they all
>> end up being pixmaps, just like the png themes. The svgs could as well
>> be pre-rendered.
>>
>> What more is that people doing svg themes seem to have noticed that
>> vector formats don't render well at different small sizes, so you often
>> have to do several svg versions for different sizes. So you don't even
>> get the benefit of only having to do one size of each icon.
>
> Well, ideally the svg engine people would take a hint from say Truetype
> fonts and just add the capability of having certain small / common sizes
> be pre-rendered as pixmaps. Other than that, svg engine is to me roughly
> in the same class as an engine that called java to have swing paint the
> widgets or did the same with ghostscript so you can have Postsript
> themes...

I've been told that librsvg renders SVG's faster than liblng render's
PNG's...  and I haven't noticed SVG themes being any slower than pixmap
themes...

>>
>> I just don't see the point. Maybe I'm missing something.
>>
>
> I've always assumed it started as a joke 'hey, see we can extend the svg
> icons wother so all you get all of your display rendered from svg',
> possibly at the urging of some of the people around who still think NEWS
> was the best display system around...

I think the great idea is resolution independence...  Trying to get to a
point where we can actually use all the power of our graphics cards and
monitors and still see things on the screen.  Sounds good to me...

Dan