Re: Icon suggestion

[Warren Young <tangent cyberport com>]

Damien Miller wrote:
> 
> On Sat, 7 Aug 1999 nelson-gnome@crynwr.com wrote:
> 
> > Miguel was showing me a vector-based graphics renderer at the ZD Open
> > Source Expo (sorry, I don't remember the name of it).  If we had
> > vector-based graphics for icons, then a whole theme of icons could be
> > generated simply by specifying the proper transform for the vectors,
> > along with a pixmap of an empty icon.
> 
> SGI have done this for ages with their display PostScript based
> desktop. It works quite well, but their icons are pretty bland.

Having created some vector graphics in my time, I can tell you that
vector graphics aren't the right tool for the job unless you're willing
to put a _lot_ of work into them and are willing to put up with
_loooong_ render times as the images are rasterized 2 or 3 times larger
than the target canvas and then downsampled for smoothness.  Not to
mention that the resulting files will probably be a lot larger for all
but the simplest images, and you'll probably want to cache the generated
.png images anyway.

Yes, it's a cool idea, but not very practical.

Vector graphics _are_ useful occasionally, though: for my own programs,
many of the graphics were first created in Corel Draw! and then
rasterized, downsampled to the sizes I needed and optimized.  They look
much better that way than if I'd tried it in a paint program.  (I can't
draw a straight line, but Corel Draw! can!)  

Now if Corel will get around to releasing Draw! for Linux.....
-- 
= Warren 
= ICBM Address: 36.8274040 N, 108.0204086 W, alt. 1714m