Re: Migrating away from GtkStock stuff

[Emmanuele Bassi <ebassi gmail com>]

On Thu, 7 Feb 2019 at 11:52, Gabriele Greco via gtk-app-devel-list <
gtk-app-devel-list gnome org> wrote:

> Hi guys,
>
> I'm in the process of migrating a big code base from GTK 2.x to GTK 3.x,
> I've done most of the work, but I'm facing now some problems with GTK stock
> stuff.
>
> I used stock stuff a lot to reduce the localizable strings needed in my
> code and to reduce the number of images to ship.
>
> From what I've seen there are no more stock items in GTK 3 (3.24.2 at the
> moment), since they have been deprecated in 3.10.
That's not correct: GTK still ships the stock icons. You can find them in
the tree as `gtk/icons/<size>/<category>/`. The icons themselves are built
into the GTK shared library as GResources.

The labels are still there, but you're strongly encouraged to ship your own
strings, with your own mnemonics; GTK cannot know which mnemonics you or
your translators use, so there will inevitably be conflicts, which will
make your application look bad, or behave worse.


> It's more a removal than a deprecation since my code compiles but the
> program seems to fail to find at least the icons pointed by the stock item:
>
> (<unknown>:75970): Gtk-WARNING **: 12:47:16.541: Error loading theme icon
> 'document-new' for stock: Icon 'document-new' not present in theme Adwaita
> (<unknown>:75970): Gtk-WARNING **: 12:47:16.598: Error loading theme icon
> 'document-open' for stock: Icon 'document-open' not present in theme
> Adwaita
> (<unknown>:75970): Gtk-WARNING **: 12:47:16.599: Error loading theme icon
> 'document-save' for stock: Icon 'document-save' not present in theme
> Adwaita
> (<unknown>:75970): Gtk-WARNING **: 12:47:16.599: Error loading theme icon
> 'edit-find' for stock: Icon 'edit-find' not present in theme Adwaita
If you're using `edit-find` or `document-save` then you're using a named
icon from the icon theme, not the stock identifier.

For those, you'll have to ship an icon theme like Adwaita.

There is a stack overflow post that suggests how to handle the migration
> from a GtkStock item to a "named icon" or a "gtk localized label":
>
>
> https://stackoverflow.com/questions/36805505/gtk-stock-is-deprecated-whats-the-alternative
>
> ... but what about toolbar or buttons that given the theme may have icons,
> labels or both?

You are strongly encouraged to reduce the number of icons in your UI to
begin with; icons need to be extremely recognisable if you want to reduce
the mental load on users, and if you're showing both text and icons, users
will use the text, not the icon, to know what ai UI element does—if they
don't memorise the spatial location of the UI element, in which case
they'll use spatial memory instead of icon/text memory:

https://uxmyths.com/post/715009009/myth-icons-enhance-usability

In any case, if you wish to move away from stock elements, the
recommendation is to move to icon theme names (GTK deprecation notes will
tell you what to use instead, if there is a replacement). If you don't want
to ship a whole icon theme, because of disk/download size constraints, or
build a list of icon assets you know you are using, and then you can either
take the Adwaita icon theme and remove everything you don't use, or create
the same file system layout as the icon theme but under your own
application's data directory:

https://wiki.gnome.org/DraftSpecs/ThemableAppSpecificIcons

Ciao,
 Emmanuele.

-- 
https://www.bassi.io
[@] ebassi [@gmail.com]