Re: dia consistency (look & feel of graphical elements)

[Alan Horkan <horkana maths tcd ie>]

On Thu, 11 Sep 2003, Ian Redfern wrote:

> It's quite hard to make complex icons comprehensible in a 20x20 box,

I'd go for 48x48 (Gnome/KDE friendly) if my screen was not so
damned
small, 32x32 would be more windows friendly although I believe Windows XP
supports much larger icon sizes.

48x48 shrunk to 24x24 migth look alright attempting to shrink to 16x16
automatically is unlikely to be clear enough.

I dont know if is still true but librsvg was faster than libpng, creating
the preview icons would be a good idea particularly for larger sizes.  In
some cases (really tall or really wide icons, I have some picture borders
I should finish) a user created icon would still be necessary.

I think it would be better if either the buttons or the shape export
helped to make the icons square rather than rectangular.

> particularly when so many of Cisco's differ only in detail. I have to
> admit that I didn't get far in standardising the sizes - it's hard work!

> I'm currently working on colour versions of the Cisco icons, and plan to
> standardise on one size for all of them - I haven't worked out what that
> size should be yet.

I had a vague intention to write myself a helper script for the GIMP but
script-fu always takes me vastly longer than I imagine, I have not quite
gotten the hang of Scheme just yet.

> They look a lot better in colour, but I didn't have the technology to
> convert the colour ones last year.

http://public.logica.com/~redferni/dia/

I notice that you Use OpenOffice to convert a powerpoint document to
postscript to SVG rather than just using the SVG Export that OpenOffice
provides but makes sense, you already had the work done to convert from
Poscript to SVG to Dia.

> > > The icons ought to be resized, though some of them are going to be hard to
> > > understand at that size.

> Frankly, some of them are hard to understand at any size...

> With the current Cisco icon set at over 300, a text-based list of names
> starts to become interesting.

Very, you might have to fork Dia and have "Cisco Dia"!
(joking, please dont fork or even branch)
but it does show how vital it is that the sheets mechanism be able to
scale up to hundreds of shapes.

> I don't want Dia to turn into an advert for Cisco, but they have been
> very generous to put all these icons into the public domain, so it

I would not worry about it, great to have more shapes.

> seemed only fair to take them as a complete set, rather than pick just
> the generic ones. I'm happy to add others to fill holes (e.g. CD-ROM,

> blade server, even Tux) if anyone has any suggestions.

http://sodipodi.sourceforge.net/showsvg.php3?file=gallery/logos/tux.svg
Tux here in SVG.  I am tempted to redo it as a Dia .shape but I really
should look at the SVG code instead or see if there is stuff from here
http://svg.kde.org/ or here http://xsvg.org/ that would make it easier to
have better SVG support and shared code we would not have to maintain so
much.

some beatiful SVG Clipart computer icons and stuff from Jimmac that would
be fantastic in Dia
http://jimmac.musichall.cz/i.php3?ikony=80

I have long wished I could use the Gorrilla Theme SVG file icons in dia to
draw a little web site map and put the gorilla file icon for each type
where approrpriate.

Ages ago I talked with Hub about maybe using some of the Gfig icons or
maybe Ximian OpenOffice Draw Icons in Dia.

Ximian OpenOffice Icons by Jimmac
http://jimmac.musichall.cz/i.php3?ikony=77

Gfig Icons by Jimmac
http://jimmac.musichall.cz/i.php3?ikony=72

I really do think better SVG support is important, but then there are
so many important things that could be done, and never enough time.

Sincerely

Alan Horkan
http://advogato.org/person/AlanHorkan/