[Qgis-developer] icons and styles

[mayeul.kauffmann at free.fr]

Hi,
+1 for the style and icon repository!
Maybe you will find useful ideas in the way openclipart.org manages collections and packages.
One contributor of free icons (SJJB?) sometimes puts several icons in one file, see:
http://www.openclipart.org/detail/12368

To generate sets of icons from gray scale icons (with or without boundary) you may want to have a look at the scripts I mentioned here:
http://www.qgis.org/wiki/Using_OpenStreetMap_data#Add_new_OSM_icons
It may be interesting to separate original svg icons that were designed to be modifiable with scripts and icons meant for end users. The above scripts replace strings in the xml so it's quite easy to understand and use, but I can help you modify it if you need to.
For the metadata/information related to an icon, it could be useful to be able to add some information about its usage in QGIS (with wich style set(s) it is used and with which rule).
For instance, there are already icons to represent those 2 different cases (with OSM data):
tourism=alpine_hut AND heating=fireplace
tourism=alpine_hut AND (heating=no OR [heating key does not exists])
Sharing this would allow the visitors to know how a specific icon is used without having to open all projects. It should be possible to extract the rules from the qml files. Just my 2 cents.
Mayeul

----- Mail Original -----
De: "Alex Mandel" <tech_dev at wildintellect.com>
À: qgis-developer at lists.osgeo.org
Envoyé: Mardi 22 Février 2011 10h00:30 GMT +01:00 Amsterdam / Berlin / Berne / Rome / Stockholm / Vienne
Objet: Re: [Qgis-developer] icons and styles

On 02/22/2011 12:50 AM, Paolo Cavallini wrote:
> Hi all.
> I think we should provide an opportunity for uploading sets of icons and
> styles, on the same infrastructure that we are going to use for plugins.
> I'd appreciate comments on this.
> All the best.

It's already on the to do list for the django web app. I'm working with
the OSGeo Graphics mailing list to try and coordinate efforts on this
since they've been thinking about the idea and have an svn folder for it.

In particular I've already started on some tools to automate keeping
collections of icons in single svg files and using inkscape to split
them into individual files for application use, while preserving
metadata about the icons in the svg files themselves. My plan at this
point is to then use a Django app to catalog the keywords tags from a
specific field in the svg xml into a searchable database and then
replicate this functionality locally as a plugin (possibly future core
item in symbology). Note, as far as I know this will only work for point
symbology right now, I do not have a plan for lines or polygon fills yet
but that's because they aren't svg based at this time.

The whole thing is still in the very early stages so I welcome
conversation on the topic and invite others to join OSGeo graphics to
really find a multi-app solution for the FOSS GIS community. It will
probably be a few months before we get anything up on the website, since
there are much higher priorities for the plugin site that still need to
be done.

Thanks,
Alex
_______________________________________________
Qgis-developer mailing list
Qgis-developer at lists.osgeo.org
http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/qgis-developer