Re: GNOMEPrint, Icons, and shades of InSight..

[JR Tipton <nails maybe net>]

On Sun, 9 Aug 1998, Bowie Poag wrote:
> > What made multiple icon sizes unworkable at Insight?  At least tell us that
> > much.
[snip]
> Well, thats beside the point. Lets talk about the feasability issues I
> mentioned.
> 
> InSight was to have come pre-equipped with four sets of 256 icons. Each
> set was kinda like a different style. So, grand total, you had 1024 icons
> to more or less encompass everything you would need an icon to do. 
[more snippage]
> The problem we ran into was, that after X amount of time, that archive was
> going to grow. I remember doing the math, and coming up with some kind of
> outrageously high storage requirement for the cache, if we were to allow
> arbitrary values to be used for how small the user wanted the icons to be.


Has anyone thought about vector graphics?  They only take up space for
being more complex, not for being larger.

If you're not familiar with vector-based graphics, check out Adobe
Illustrator or Macromedia's Freehand.  I used to work in this medium a lot
and found it to be great; things that when done in bitmap file formats
(i.e. XPM or PNG) are literally hundreds of megabytes can be around 100k
when done with vector graphics and are dependably resizable to arbitrary
sizes.

william r. tipton