Re: Scaling icons

[Bill Haneman <bill haneman sun com>]

Hi:

This icon scaling discussion is making me a little uneasy.  I admit I
haven't been able to follow every turn, but from what I have been able
to read carefully so far, I have some concerns regarding accessibility.

Accessibility is a critical customer of icon scaling algorithms, and
it's vital that whatever we do respects accessibility requirements. 
That means that icon scaling must be _reliable_ and possible regardless
of what resolutions icons are available in.  It's important for themes
that icons respect size settings, even if the results are "ugly". 
Proposing behavior that refuses to resize "scalable" icons seems likely
to break accessibility.

Likewise, it's much nicer to allow scaling of icons whether they are
"themed" or not; why should it matter whether an icon is "default" ?

I see potential for regression here.  Please help the accessibility team
by thinking through the accessibility use cases here, and recognising
that it's important that the gtk-icon-size setting be respected across
the board in GNOME applications.  Will the current proposals ensure that
this still works?

regards,

Bill

> > Alex may remember better than I do, but I think the reason that
> > this was added to nautilus was that problems appeared with
> > small icons being scaled to large sizes, which typically
> > looks hideous. You can always scale down and things just get
> > a little bit fuzzy, scaling up is more problematical.
> > 
> > Your probably right that basing on the size rather than scale factor
> > doesn't make a lot of sense; so perhaps a rule along the lines
> > scale only if desired_size / image_size < 1.5 makes sense.
> 
> Assuming there's no real reason why nautilus's algorithm is
> based on size, this appears more correct IMHO.
> 
> > Or perhaps we just shouldn't scale unthemed icons at all.
> 
> Not something I feel able to comment on.
>