On Sunday 14 Jun 2015 11:43:37 Alex DEKKER wrote: > Allow me to row back somewhat: > > $ locate kde4/apps | grep icons | grep svg | wc -l > 134 > $ locate kde4/apps | grep icons | grep png | wc -l > 1090 > > Looking through /usr/share/kde4/apps/*/icons it seems that, er, perhaps > PNG is the dominant icon format after all.
Ah - good research. I wonder whether this may have anything to do with the lack of a special-purpose SVG-oriented icon editor. At one SVG icon-set page I found : http://svgicons.sourceforge.net/ the author comments "All icons in BlueSphere theme are designed using SVG format. I have used Sodipodi vector-drawing program, and partially hand-crafted (!!!!!) SVG (XML) files using KWrite" - (my exclamation marks). An interesting article here: http://www.svgopen.org/2008/papers/104-SVG_in_KDE/ contains the disturbing remark: "The loss of quality in vector graphics at small size is a severe problem. Rendering vector graphics primitives at low resolutions introduces a certain amount of blur into the output. This is mainly caused by horizontal and vertical primitives which happen to fall between pixel boundaries, which in turn makes the anti-aliasing algorithms try to cope with it by rasterizing two, instead of one rows/columns but at a lower color intensity. For primitives which are rendered at small sizes the goals of "resolution independence" and "preserving their good looks across resolutions" diverges a lot. We have the former, we need the latter." which makes me think the use of SVG in this context is a little embryonic. [As an aside, I'm faintly horrified to find this standard 128px x 128px SVG icon http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Oxygen480-status-dialog-information.svg occupies a file size of 120Kb ! .... looking at the source recalls the old joke "XML is like violence - if it doesn't work, use more"] Not that bitmap-style icon technology seems any better provisioned with dedicated utilities. I note that the standard Gnome bitmap icon editor utility also seems dead in the water: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1161899 http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/linux-newbie-8/icon-editor-for- ubuntu-4175490127/ http://sourceforge.net/projects/iconedit/ "As of 2015-02-16, this project is no longer under active development" It's *weird* ..... back in the days of [gulp] Windows 3.1, it seemed that almost everyone tried their hand at writing an icon-editor utility, and there were many freeware and shareware tools (of varying quality) available. On those cover diskettes that came with magazines there was almost always an icon editor or two ..... I wonder what changed people's minds. On the upside, this means I can add yet another basic missing platform tool to my list of KDE applications to work upon when I've achieved basic competency. Cheers Nick -- If Linux was a car, there'd be 18 steering wheels and no air conditioning, but you'd be able to change the radio station from the hubcaps. -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-kde-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: https://lists.debian.org/201506151659.38660.n...@glimmer.demon.co.uk
