> On 15 Mar 2018, at 14:20, Shantanu Tushar <shaan...@gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> On 6 March 2018 at 22:15, Xavier Bigand <flamaros.xav...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> If your sample picture is relevant I can suggest you to convert it as SVG 
> (vectoring it) or using distance field technique.
> 
> I had this question for a while now - if we can use SVGs for showing 
> application icons (which will then look good with any dimensions / DPI), why 
> is it common to use images instead? There's obviously some benefit to images 
> as people take pains to bundle multiple versions for different DPIs, I wanted 
> to know what they are. Most of the stuff I can find online is always talking 
> about websites and "web apps" which might not all apply to desktop 
> applications.
> 
> I see that Uwe has pointed out a performance issue which can happen because 
> of multiple renderings due to size changes. Is that it? Or are there other 
> reasons behind preferring PNG icons over SVG?

I think it’s mainly that SVG rendering is slow because it’s done in software, 
and also that qtsvg only supports SVG Tiny, so it can’t render everything that 
you can design in Inkscape, for example.  You have keep the SVGs simple and 
avoid features that we don’t support (blurs, gradients, line endings/arrowheads 
and lots more).  If you want full SVG support you can use webkit/webengine, but 
that’s overkill in many applications.

Speaking of distance field: If your icons are monochrome, you might consider 
making a custom icon font for your application.  You can start with something 
like Font Awesome, edit it to include only the icons you need, and add more 
custom-designed icons as necessary.  Then you can render an icon with a Text 
element.  But finding a suitable icon editing program is up to you in that 
case.  I did it with FontForge once a couple of years ago.

In the future I think it will make sense to use PDF for vector icons too (in 
color, even).  (Some frameworks already can do this.)  Then instead of an icon 
font, you could have one PDF file with all the icons for your app, one icon per 
“page”.  I hope to eventually support using a PDF file with an ordinary Image 
in QML, but we have to add API for selecting the page, and there are other 
issues with caching and so on.  I had patches to get it mostly working a couple 
of years ago, it just wasn’t 100% ready for integration.

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