Mono icons in systray

[Nuno Pinheiro]

A Terça, 11 de Dezembro de 2012 10:06:36 você escreveu:
> 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.

they seam about the same here ...

> 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:

Unless you are a realy good font designer that wil take care of the hinting 
instructions i dont see many...

> - 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.

agrea to some extent that we should get rid of the iner gradient in the icons. 
the border i sthere for contrast issue againts random backgrounds....Note 
fonts suck in that way and we have to make the (imo) overdone blured 
background.

> 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…

again do you know any font designer willing to do them?
and what is the adgantage work wise in relation to svg's? you can do the same 
in svg's creting multiple svg's for multiple rendering sizes....


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

so mono But with color pixels on the side right....

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

but ofcourse the problem is that we dont have controll over the background 
color since that is tranparent....


> 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)

Vernon is prety bussy right now and im trying to find out a way to bring him 
back to finish the font, expect some sort of oxygen fund raysing.
 
> 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)

Since it would just duplicate work, with no visible gain imo (with QT5 around 
the corner coloring an element in scenegraph is rader trivial, shaders for the 
win), I would abandon this idea.

On the making the try icons mono yeah expect that soon... 

> Thanks,
>   Best
> 
>   __J