Re: using personal icons in the GtkScaleButton

[Tadej Borovšak <tadeboro gmail com>]

Hi.

I decided to look into these things (stock items, stock icons and
named icons) a bit more once again (it's been a while since I last did
that anyway). I'll describe their usage from regular developer's point
of view ("How to use this things?").

First, this is simple diagram demonstrates how things fit together:

.-----------------------.   .-----------.   .-------.
| image from icon theme |   | GdkPixbuf |   | image |
'-----------+-----------'   '-----+-----'   '---+---'
            |                     |             |
     .------ˇ-----.               |             |
     | named icon |               |             |
     '------+-----'     .---------'             |
            |           |                       |
            '-------.   |  .--------------------'
	            |   |  |
                 .--ˇ---ˇ--ˇ--.               .------------.
                 | stock icon | <- same ID -> | stock item |
	         '------------'               '------------'

You can see here that named icons are part of the icon theming
machinery while stock icons can use named icons as one source of
icons, but there are other ways of getting images. I added stock items
into the mix just to demonstrate that they are actually completely
separate thing and are only connected with stock icons through shared
ID.


Now to the problem at hand: scale button and custom icons. First thing
I realized is that icons on scale button are named icons, which means
that they must reside in icon theme. This is probably done on purpose,
since it gives theme creators an opportunity to theme your scale
button too. But it also represents one major headache for developers,
since icons need to be installed in hicolor icon theme. I think that
it would be nice to extend scale button a bit and offer additional
methods of setting icons, but even if this does happen, it won't help
you much right now.

So basically you'll need to install your icons somewhere where theming
system will be able to find it. One option would be to install them
inside hicolor theme. Second option would be to install your icon
somewhere under your application's data folder and add that folder to
theme search path using gtk_icon_theme_append_search_path().

I hope this will help you get your application working.

Tadej

-- 
Tadej Borovšak
tadeboro.blogspot.com
tadeboro gmail com
tadej borovsak gmail com