Re: stock icon themes

[Tim Janik <timj gtk org>]

On 26 Jul 2000, Havoc Pennington wrote:

> 
> Hi,
> 

in general i have to say this looks pretty good.
i just have presumably minor things to add/ask ;)

> Briefly though, what you want to do is tell GTK+ what file to load an
> icon from, given a triplet of direction, size, and state specifying
> the desired icon.
> 
> In the simplest case, you use the same icon for all text directions,
> all icon sizes, and all states. In this case, GTK+ is going to scale
> the icon to various standard sizes, and also do some simple
> fading/brightening to make it look insensitive or prelighted. The icon
> will be the same in left-to-right and right-to-left languages.
> 
> The simple case might look like this:
> 
>     style "myicons"
>     {
>       stock["gtk-dialog-warning"] = 
>         { 
>           { "stock-icons/dialog_error.png", *, *, *} 

could we simplify the syntax here to allow missing fields be asterisk
automatically? i.e. use
           { "stock-icons/dialog_error.png" } 
instead of
           { "stock-icons/dialog_error.png", *, *, *} 

>         }
>     }
> 
>     class "GtkImage" style "myicons"
> 
> Here, the direction, state, and size are all wildcarded, indicating
> that "stock-icons/dialog_error.png" is to be used as the source image
> for all variants of this icon.
> 
> (I just noticed that we have to address the issue of the pixmap search
> path, or else we have to require an absolute path in these files; 
> suggestions on that welcome. Note that pixmaps will typically come
> with the theme. But, back to the point.)

i hate to raise this for you, but ;) 
in light of the ongoing inline pixbuf discussion, and since you can (and
should be able to) define application-specifc stock items here, and since
the "rcfile"can be an inlined rcstring to set things up app-wide we also
need a way to refer to inlined pixbufs.

> You might also want to specify _different_ source images for different
> icon specifications. Two common cases are that you want to hand-draw
> icons at a given size, instead of scaling; or you want to reverse an
> image for LTR or RTL languages. In those cases, you specify more than
> one icon source:
> 
>     style "myicons"
>     {
>       stock["gtk-dialog-warning"] = 
>         { 
>           { "stock-icons/dialog_error_ltr.png", LTR, *, *},
>           { "stock-icons/dialog_error_rtl.png", RTL, *, *}  
>         }
>     }
> 
> or:
> 
>     style "myicons"
>     {
>       stock["gtk-dialog-warning"] = 
>         { 
>           { "stock-icons/dialog_error_menu_size.png", *, *, MENU},
>           { "stock-icons/dialog_error_dialog_size.png", *, *, DIALOG}, 
>           /* fall back */
>           { "stock-icons/dialog_error_fallback.png", *, *, *}  
>         }
>     }
> 
> So, that's the general idea.
> 
> The order of appearance of the icon sources is not significant; the
> "best match" source is the one that gets used. For determining the
> best match, direction has priority over state has priority over
> size. The idea there is that they are in order of semantic importance,
> rather than aesthetic importance; you need to get arrows pointing the
> right way, then get things properly sensitive-looking or not, then you
> can worry about whether scaling causes jaggies. Note that the order of
> specification in the rc file matches the priority (direction, state,
> size). (I just changed that BTW, it wasn't true in the original
> patch.)
> RTL, LTR correspond to GTK_TEXT_DIR_LTR and GTK_TEXT_DIR_RTL.
> 
> MENU, DIALOG, etc. correspond to this enum:
> 
>     typedef enum
>     {
>       GTK_ICON_MENU,
>       GTK_ICON_BUTTON,
>       GTK_ICON_SMALL_TOOLBAR,
>       GTK_ICON_LARGE_TOOLBAR,
>       GTK_ICON_DIALOG
>     } GtkIconSizeType;

hmmmm. i have an issue here, for BEAST i already classify icons/icon sizes
by BUTTON, MENU, TOOLBAR, PALETTE. i'd either need to be able to add my
PALETTE classification dynamically (i.e. we'd have to use strings here
as well), or we'd need PALETTE in there as well. but then other apps
come up with different classes...

> gtkrc.c already knew about the GtkStateType tokens, so those didn't
> need to be added.

uhm! ok now i'm getting it, so you mean:

  { "stock-icons/dialog_error_menu_size.png", * /* LTR/RTL */, PRELIGHT, MENU },
  { "stock-icons/dialog_error_menu_size.png", * /* LTR/RTL */, NORMAL, MENU },

hm, thinking about it more, i get a feeling like we need to be able
to specify sizes literally, e.g. "32x32", and also feature aliases
like "MENU" (translating to say "16x16") that can be user adjusted.

> That's all the info on this I can think to write down, so if you have
> other questions just ask.
> 
> Havoc
> 

---
ciaoTJ