[QGIS-Developer] SVG icons in QGIS

[Richard Duivenvoorde]

Hi Jonathan,

I do not want to sound rude, but I think you really underestimate the possibilities and complexity of the icons and QGIS styling and styling resources in general.

About the 'Resource Sharing Plugin':
- styling (of points) is never only about the little icon. styling and symbols are complex beasts. If you google the plugins QEP, you will see that it (also) started of as a 'simple todo' but ended up in current form
- did you have a look: because there are a LOT of styling resources already: simple ones (like mine with actually only some icons), but others giving you the capabilities to show all dimension labels and arrows of your geometries, and again others very specific for a certain working area: oil&gas icons, Red Cross-map icons etc etc

I'd be OK with cleaning up, but a good thing on the Resource Plugin is that it fetches a (online, be it on github or on you webserver!) set of styling resources: symbols, styles, icons, colors, whatever is possible. Please try Faunalia's 'Distance Measurement Styles'. One click and it will be available for you.

About metadata and searching: cool, would also be nice if that could work for Resources. Isn't there some kind of SVG-standard for this?

About all in one directory: fine, or at least for the ones QGIS gives you upon install (the 'App' folder). But I also like the way the Resource plugin orders them in folders (see screenshot).

But as Saber proposes: please create a QEP so there can be some centralized discussion.

Regards,

Richard Duivenvoorde



On 7/27/20 1:42 PM, Jonathan Moules wrote:
> Hi List,
> 
> The more I look at the current SVG icons, the more I'm thinking it really needs some TLC (Tender Loving Care). As far as I can tell, icons are categorised by the directory they're in, so if you want an icon to appear in two categories, you put the icon in there twice... and so that's just what has happened! I suspect the current set has simply accreted over time.
> 
> Examples of weirdnesses:
> * The "food" and "entertainment" categories are basically identical, but have different icons for the same thing.
> * There are at least 7 near-identical aeroplane icons(!)
> * There's cycle parking and cycle locking, but no cycle? No car (that's under "gpsicons") but two taxis? Oh, and 5 (five!) aeroplanes to choose from, and multiple types of train. And that's just "transport".
> * "Shopping" has a hammer and a pawprint in it... well, I mean, you can buy those things sure, but that seems like a rather odd place to put them.
> * "landmark" seems to basically be a subset of "religion", with a museum and a weird icon for a "school" thrown in for good measure.
> 
> I'm sure there are many more.
> 
> Given the importance of a good symbol library for cartography, this seems like a fairly significant issue, but fortunately it's pretty "easy" to fix (compared to writing a data processing algorithm anyway ;-) ).
> 
> My thoughts:
> * Move the svg's into a single directory. (Though would break any current projects symbology using them I guess?)
> * Use a metadata file to categorise them, so you get a list of categories as now and a single symbol can be in multiple categories.
> * Add a search feature so the user can quickly find "museum" without having to guess where it has been categorised.
> * Clean up the current symbols by removing duplicates.
> * Add the font-awesome symbols (per my thread on the User List) to fill in the gaps and flesh out the collection. As a bonus, it comes with metadata for categories and search terms (YAML files).
> 
> * bonus - metadata is internationalised so "museo" (IT), "muzeu" (RO), etc would also work for finding that museum.
> 
> Thoughts?
> 
> Cheers,
> Jonathan
> 
> 
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