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 _______________________________________________ Plasma-devel mailing list Plasma-devel@kde.org https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/plasma-devel
