Re: SVG icons for HighContrast theme

["Thomas Wood" <thos gnome org>]

I was planning to send out an e-mail very similar to this one, but you
seem to have beaten me to it! We need to make sure we can get as many
people involved with this discussion, so please make sure you let as many
people know about it as possible.

> Hi everyone,
>
> this email is about a SVG version of HighContrast icon theme and some
> improvement in gnome-themes package.
>
> 1. SVG icons
>
>         Why? Well, because it's needed :-) HC vector icons are simpler
> to draw and maintain, can be scaled up and down "loss-less", and
> so on. Remember that HC icons are simply B&W icons, so no
> shadows, no lights, no details. Only round corners to make them
> sexier.

<snip>

This is a good idea, although we need to make sure we can all track these
bugs with a gnome-themes-maint gnome bugs e-mail alias. I'm not sure why
your new bug didn't get assigned to this alias as I thought this was being
set up. I'll chase it up and find out what happened.

I know Andreas Nillson was keen on helping out with filling the gaps in
the HC icon theme, so maybe this is something you can work together on.
There are quite a large number of bugs open for missing icons in the HC
icons theme. In fact, probably about half the total bugs open for
gnome-themes are HC icon theme related.


>
> 2. Theme specs
>
>         Currently gnome-themes still provides icons in gtkrc format. GTK
> + supports icon themes. Major GNOME apps too. We can and we
> should use it. Why? well, as above, it's simpler then edit gtkrc
> file. Just place the image in the proper directory with the
> proper name. Moreover it's a fd.o standard. Moreover icon theme
> and control theme should be separated IMHO.


This should definitely be fixed. If it's not already filed in bugzilla, it
should be. I'll get to work on it once we've got a bug report open.


>         BTW: what about recent icon-theme-naming specs?? Is better use
> it immediately or respect it later?


This is another issue I was going to raise. Probably best to get Rodney
Dawes' opinion on this too, but I think it's definitely something we need
to move towards. Again, we ought to open a tracker bug for all the icon
themes in gnome-themes.

<snip>

> 3. Themes framework
>
>         Of course HighContrast(LargePrint) is just the peak of the
> iceberg. gnome-themes package needs to be refreshed. I'm not
> speaking only about "old" themes (a11y apart, we are shipping
> the same themes from 2.0!!), but also about installation
> framework.
>
>         Interesting goals could be:
>               * clean up "pleasure" themes, revamping them and removing
>                 icon stuff; we are in GNOME 2.12 but gnome-themes seems
> locked to GNOME 2.2 :-((

Interestingly, while I was manning the GNOME stand at LinuxWorld London a
few weeks ago, I was talking to someone about what they thought of GNOME,
and he mentioned that he thought a lot of the default themes looked very
similar. I had a think about this, and it's actually true (Mist and Simple
themes for example). Not to mention most of the icon themes are woefully
out of date (new icons missing) and incomplete.

We have two options here; either we remove the old themes completely, and
replace them with new fresh and more up to date themes, or we revamp the
old ones, improving them and making them more interesting. We certainly
don't want to just add some new ones, without taking out the old.

With the first option, we risk breaking users desktops as they upgrade,
since their old themes will no longer work. However, it does give us the
chance to start with a clean slate and properly plan some nice new themes.

The second option allows us to upgrade the current themes, but it doesn't
allow us quite as much flexibility. However, it is also a lot less work
for us to do than inventing a whole new set of themes.


<snip>

>               * provide an utility (perl? python?) to automatically
>                 produce HighContrastInverse SVG icons from HighContrast
> SVG icons simply swapping #000000 and #ffffff (or maybe
> CSS???)

Could be possible, and built into the gnome-themes build procedure. Again,
open a bug report in bugzilla to track this.

>               * dump out LowContrast icon theme: IMHO is better try to
>                 reduce the contrast through the theme engine: is it
> possible?

I'm pretty sure that is possible, although I don't know which engine the
Low Contrast theme is using.


>               * refresh the directory tree [3]
>

Interesting idea, but unfortunately will be a lot of work (re-doing
configure scripts and makefiles), and also will mean that the CVS module
becomes even more messy. It's not possible to completely delete
directories from CVS. You have to use the prune command when checking out
to remove empty directories.  I don't really see much benefit in
re-organising the gnome-themes structure as it's actually laid out quite
logically at the moment anyway.


-Thomas