Re: PDF Icon Overlay.

[Bryan Clark <bclark redhat com>]

On Mon, 2005-09-19 at 10:05 -0400, Dan Winship wrote:
> Pat Suwalski wrote:
> > Obviously, the loopy Adobe icon worked well because it didn't have 
> > anything that mattered with theme, it was more subtle. But just the 
> > letters "PDF" seem fairly generic and theme independent too. I think 
> > this works, at least, as you say, for the time being.
> 
> But does it add anything? You can see from the thumbnail that it's a 
> document. Who (other than the marketing department at Adobe) cares that 
> it's specifically a PDF document, especially since it will be displayed 
> using exactly the same viewer whether it's pdf, ps, or dvi?

Originally I wanted the icon overlay for two reasons, one: it looks
cool, and the other: is that it actually does help people, (at least
with PDFs)

People often produce PDF documents as a format that can be shared with
people not running OOo or Abi or other alternative office applications.
This tends to lead to having two copies of the same document, file name
and content are the same, but different formats.  With the little PDF
icon we distinguish ourselves from the original format which often has
inherent editing capabilities and other things that PDFs are not really
designed for.

So the icon simply helped in choosing which document is the PDF and
which one isn't.  In a perfect world off in the distant future document
formats might not matter, but I doubt that's really going to happen
while evince is around.  Formats are so tightly coupled with the
capabilities of the editor that I believe making the files appear
distinct is a real advantage.

PS might have a similar need for this type of icon, but I never bothered
to push for that.  (I don't even know if we thumbnail those).  For DVIs
I didn't see the same use case as PDFs, didn't look into it much though.

Icon history in a nutshell,
~ Bryan