Re: [Gimp-gui] About symbolic dark/light themes

[Jehan <jehan girinstud io>]

Hi,

On 2015-12-09 23:52, Andrew Pullins wrote:
> I have a very successful Icon theme that people seem to like.  My
> theme gives people the options of Darker, Dark, Light, and Lighter
> themes.  Darker and Dark have dark panels but light icons, Light and
> Lighter have light panels but dark icons.  Everything in the theme
> lights up GIMP Orange when selected or hovered over.

We'd be happy to have contributors to the new official theme. This is 
the reason of my opening this thread. :-)

You are welcome to check the master branch and propose some of your 
icons (or newly made) for the missing icons, or even propose different 
icons for the existing symbolic ones if you believe you have a better 
symbol to represent a function. Just make bug reports with your proposed 
icons.

> my theme is GPL V2 but I can change that if need be, my icons are
> licened under the creative commons license: to Share — to copy,
> distribute and transmit the work, to Remix — to adapt the work, to
> make commercial use of the work.

We had a problem (or at least an uncertainty) about the CC by-sa 
license. If I remember correctly, this is because we are embedding icons 
within the main code. Well at least for what we choose to be the default 
icon theme, but since we may want to make the symbolic theme the default 
theme at some point (though I am personally not set on this), we don't 
want to block our future choices.

So that means you'd have to relicense as GPLv3. But since you say that's 
no problem below, well that's good.

See the FSF answer to our question about GPLv3 - CC by-sa compatibility 
here: 
https://mail.gnome.org/archives/gimp-developer-list/2013-October/msg00112.html

> both licenses can be changed if need be.  All I want is for people to
> be able to freely distribute it, make changes, and distribute those
> changes as their own as long as they give others the same rights.
>
> There are a few problems that I have found when making this theme.
>
> Bug 724834 [8]: Some icons do not change properly depending on what
> state they are in.  Some icons will show their active state/icon when
> inactive and other icons will show their inactive state/icon when
> active.  This is not a problem for the current icon theme and is
> understand able as to why it was over looked but for themes such as
> mine where all icons change depending on their state.  This not only
> makes my theme look bad but GIMP as well.
>
> Bug 742300 [9]: GIMP allows SVG icons under Linux and Mac but the SVG
> pixbuf loader is missing from the Windows version. This is a huge
> problem as we get more and more high resolution screens. SVG icons
> always look good where as bitmap does not.

Using SVG icons directl would be very interesting, in my opinion to 
handle dynamically many different kind of screens.

If all platforms are not perfectly handled though, I guess this will 
wait until all main platforms are fully working with vectorial icons.

> When I started this project I only had two themes but then I added one
> more gradient lighter/darker. At first all my themes had their own
> copies of the icons. That would be 350 icons per set or 1400 icons all
> together. So I started changeing how my theme worked. I created a
> Decor folder that held my icons along with other things. This way both
> Dark and Darker could link to the same icon set instead of each having
> their own. But this seems to be some what problematic. At times it
> just did not work for no apparent reasons.

I'm not sure we should have too many themes. A dark and a light seems a 
good deal to me. If people wants more choices, they can always search 
and download (or make their own). The goal is not to suit each and every 
one's need, because it is impossible (there is always someone who is not 
happy with the default). So we should just propose a few sane choices, 
and let people with more specific needs install other themes.

> I think it would be beneficial to separate the icon themes from the
> background themes. That way you could change out the background theme
> but keep the icons you like, or change out the icons and keep the
> background theme.

This is how it works in GIMP 2.9 (and 2.10). Old themes with icons set 
in the gtkrc simply won't work, I believe.

> http://android272.deviantart.com/art/Flat-GIMP-icon-Theme-V-2-1-375010811
> [10]

Checking the page, it does not seem you are the author of the icons (you 
are citing various people). Are you? If you are not, or not the only 
one, you'd have to ask permission to everyone who participated for the 
license change. You cannot do it on your own (if that is your case).

Jehan