Re: start-here page's icons

[Vadim Plessky <plessky cnt ru>]

On Monday 09 December 2002 4:46 pm, Jeff Waugh wrote:
|  <quote who="Michael Meeks">
|
|  > On Mon, 2002-12-09 at 10:19, Jeff Waugh wrote:
|  > > SVG is generally inappropriate for icons because, whilst they scale up
|  > > very well, they do not scale down in an appropriate manner (nor
|  > > contain pixel hints). If we were to go with SVG icons, we'd have to
|  > > provide PNG formats for 16x16 through to at least 36x36.
|  >
|  > 	Of course - if we had an SVG extension [ surely this XML stuff is
|  > supposed to be extensible ? ] - whereby we could 'hint' an SVG icon to
|  > render well at low res it'd be great to switch everything to svg.
|  >
|  > 	How tough can that be ?
|
|  Heh. Okay, so, let's establish first that font hinting is fucking hard,
| very font-specific, and a shitload of work. But it is domain-specific, and
| you can generalise on roman characters (most systems do).

well, while font-hinting is indeed hard, it's not "fucking hard". :-)
You just want:
* avoid touching TrueType fonts (TT Bytecode Interpreter/OpCodes)
* and use PS Type1 hinting model (or Adobe Type2/CFF hinting model, which is 
quite similiar to Type1 but results in more compact font)
* upgrade to latest FreeType (2.1.3, as of today), as FreeType improves 
rapidly, and 2.1.3 has important fixes for font rendering (AA renderer, PS 
hinter, auto-hinter, etc.)
* disable LCD (sub-pixel) rendering /if you have digital LCD display and have 
it enabled/, as it doesn't work fine with latest FreeType

For further details, see FT-2.1.3 announce and David Turner's comments to this 
release (http://www.freetype.org)

Important thing to understand here is that "anti-aliasing increases effective 
addressable resolution of oyur screen (printer, rendering device, pixmap)".
I doubt that it doubles your resolution, but formal number for dpi increase in 
1.3-1.6 range seems quite reasonable to me.
To get nice rendering on screen, you really want at least 200dpi resolution 
(and I think that 300dpi should be our goal in long-terms).
This means that 150dpi with AA-> about 225 dpi "addressable" resolution is 
minimal acceptable for good UI.
I think we would be able to get LCD panels with such resolution (about 
2048x1600) in year or two.

|
|  Now apply that to the many different shapes (a piece of paper, a folder, a
|  yellow button, a star, a computer monitor, etc) and messages behind the
|  images (the paintbrush in the background icon is important, etc)...

What you may want to "hint" is minimum width/height for certan elements.
I doubt that you need precisely same width/height for different parts of same 
drawing, like, say, vertical stems in 'H' or horizontal stems in 'D'.
This is *implementable*.
Due to possibility to have different namespaces in XML, you can add such 
extensions to SVG without breaking XML format of SVG.

|
|  Whoa. I think it would make for an excellent PhD thesis. :-)

I agree. I wish I was younger to right such thesis.   :-)

|
|  - Jeff

-- 
Best Regards,

Vadim Plessky
SVG Icons * BlueSphere Icons 0.3.0 released
http://svgicons.sourceforge.net