Re: Scaling icons

[Owen Taylor <otaylor redhat com>]

On Mon, 2003-05-19 at 12:50, Bill Haneman wrote:
> 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 don't understand this comment; default icons are just part of the
"hicolor" icon theme and are installed in such a way that they will
be scaled.

The main proposals are that 

 A) If an icon theme author says "this icon should be used for sizes
    between 18 and 22 pixels" we only scale it if the desired
    sizes is less than 18 or greater than 22 pixels.

 B) If icon theme authors install an icon as "fixed size", we
    honor that.

> 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?

An icon theme author could intentionally defeat scaling if they
wanted to.

Regards,
                                               Owen