A couple of questions about icons

[Daniel Brockman <drlion deepwood net>]

Hi List,

I'm working on a continuous little project of mine -- namely, trying
to learn how to build GUI applications using GTK+.  My current concern
is icons, and I have run into some AFAICT undocumented problems.

  * The icons on stock buttons like `Add' and `New' (created using
    libglade) look bad.  This seems to be because Glade or GTK+ wants
    the icons to be 20x20 pixels in size, but the stock icons do not
    come in this size.  What's baffling about this is that, e.g.,
    Bluecurve *does* carry all the icons in this size; it just doesn't
    declare them in its `iconrc' file.

    Owen hastily tried to explain this to me on IRC yesterday, but I
    have not really been able to figure out what he meant.  I wrote:

      ``How come the iconrc for Bluecurve in the redhat-artwork package
      doesn't define, for instance, a 20x20 stock `New' icon, or a
      16x16 stock `Close' icon?  I mean, all the icons are there, but
      most icon/size combinations just aren't defined in the rc file.
      This results in, e.g., ugly `New' buttons.''

    Owen replied:

      ``The most recent version of the RC file is suppoesd to
      *exactly* match the sizes provided by the default GTK+ theme.
      Really, with GTK+-2.4, the icon RC file just needs to be
      deleted.''

    I'm guessing that the RC file stock icon declarations are being
    phased out in favor of the kind of lookups described by the Icon
    Theme Specification[1].  If so, then I suppose that is what Owen
    was referring to.  However, I don't see how I can use this with
    GTK+ stock items, because the stock icons seem to break if I
    delete the icon RC file.

    If I give up trying to use the stock items, I can get good looking
    icons by manually fetching them from a GtkIconTheme and packing
    them with labels into buttons.  I would be satisfied with this, if
    it weren't for my next problem.

  * The Bluecurve theme from the redhat-artwork package[2] calls its
    icons hyphenated names like `stock-connect', `stock-new', and
    `stock-zoom-out', while, e.g., the gnome theme from the
    gnome-icon-theme package[3] instead uses names like
    `stock_connect', `stock_new', and and `stock_zoom-out'.

    This seems to mean that the `stock_foo-bar' style will be more
    portable, but the `stock-foo-bar' style will look better when
    using Bluecurve.  Here, I'm quite confident that I do not
    understand what is going on, because this dilemma seems too
    ridiculous to be true.


If someone could shed some light to these issues, or point me to a
good example of an application that uses icons properly, that would be
completely awesome.


Thanks,

-- 
Daniel Brockman
drlion deepwood net

[1] http://www.freedesktop.org/Standards/icon-theme-spec
[2] http://rpm.pbone.net/index.php3/stat/4/idpl/1371513/com/
      redhat-artwork-0.97-1.0.2.kde.i386.rpm.html
[3] http://cvs.gnome.org/viewcvs/gnome-icon-theme/