Mono icons in systray

[Jacopo De Simoi]

Dear all, 
 
  I noticed how the new air theme (which is just beautiful, btw) makes the 
mono icons in systray quite low-constrast; this is especially apparent with 
compositing turned off.   
I started thinking about a sensible solution which would not require 
rebuilding all mono icons every time we change the default plasma theme; 
recalling some recent post on icon fonts, I wonder if switching to an icon 
font for monochrome plasma icons would provide us with a solution; in my 
opinion there are quite a number of advantages:

- the new air theme (and the whole design trend these days) is considerably 
“flatter” than the old ones; perhaps *really* flat mono icons could fit better 
than the current ones, with all these gradients and borders. Besides, one 
could in principle render fonts with a gradient and a border, as it is already 
done for the keyboard layout applet and the plasma digital clock. 

- hinting: fonts provide hinting informations for pixel-snapping on-screen 
rendering at small sizes (which are typically the ones used in systray). This 
does not make the icon pixel perfect, but possibly quite close to it.  
Manually hinting a font is quite painful, but after all we do not have too 
many icons to take care of…

- subpixel antialiasing:  subpixel antialiasing (for those who like it) would 
possibly make curves smoother 

- coloring: icons can be colored in such a way to optimize contrast, this 
makes borders around shapes not necessary and help saving precious pixels 

Of course there are a few disadvantages:

- things get more complicated with composite icons, (e.g. volume or battery), 
so we should cook out some reasonable way to define things such as svg groups 
for fonts

- Learn to use a new tool (e.g. fontforge) to design such icons (altough we 
could obtain some help from Vernon Adams, who is designing the Oxygen font)

My proposal is to create some sort of plasma icon service, which would create 
QIcons of the right size™ from a special font; this would be totally 
transparent to applets, exactly as it is done now with svg icons embedded in 
plasma themes. 

So I am asking, what are your opinions on this? Does this make sense to you? 
Do you think is it worth working in this direction? (I'm heading for 4.11, of 
course) 

Thanks, 
  Best

  __J