[Qgis-developer] Cast your vote: Default icon theme for QGIS 2.0

[Larry Shaffer]

Hi,
> On Thu, Jan 24, 2013 at 12:18 AM, Tim Sutton <lists at linfiniti.com> wrote:
>
>   Hi
>>
>>   On Wed, Jan 23, 2013 at 2:10 AM, Larry Shaffer <larrys at dakotacarto.com>
wrote:

8<------------------------------------------------

>> 5) Clean up source code to work with only .svg icon files. But, do not
>> remove any code for theme choice, so that designers can still work on new
>> themes without having to replace the existing default one.

8<------------------------------------------------

> +1 from me on all these points too. To be clear, you are suggesting to
> ship with only one theme, but leave theme support in place?

Yes. For three reasons:

* As previously noted, this will allow future icon designers to try out new
themes without much effort and be able to switch back-forth between themes
to see differences (like now).

* Have central functions for fixing some issues (e.g. embedded rasters in
SVG), providing the source file in a variety of formats (QIcon, QPixmap,
QImage), and for abstracting away the need for an extension.

Example: QgsApplication::getThemeIcon( "vector-edit" )
This would return a QIcon, but built off of a SVG source, if one exists, if
not use a PNG. There should be no need to define the extension in the
parameter. This will help during the move from PNG to SVG, as once a SVG
file becomes available, it is automatically used.

I also suggest adding the following function:
QImage QgsApplication::getThemeImage( const QString theName )

* Allows to build some form of caching (if necessary)

Currently the QgsApplication::getTheme... functions query the filesystem,
but many of the icons are already in images.qrc (essentially a cache).
Those functions could look in the Qt resource first. Also, as part of the
build, and source install, there could be a script (e.g.
scripts/update-themes.sh) that parses the themes directory and
auto-generates a <mytheme>-theme.qrc.  Useful in QtDesigner, then later by
the built app. Keeping the filesystem calls would still allow for manual
adding of new themes by a designer.

[0]
https://github.com/qgis/Quantum-GIS/blob/master/src/core/qgsapplication.cpp#L347

>> It would be nice to have a little script in the repo that creates a
>> thumbnail gallery of all the icons.

+1 for this. Such a script could automatically push gallery updates to the
github pages orphaned branch (gh-pages) via a repo hook.

>> Also it might be nice to clean up the names a little - perhaps come up
>> with a  NounVerb.svg approach e.g. VectorEdit.svg VectorStopEdit.svg
>> so that non programmers can make sense of our naming scheme (yes I
>> know the current scheme is mainly my doing :-P).

+1 from me. Best to have the names not associated with any Qt concepts,
like 'Action'.


Lastly, other items that could be in the qgis-graphics repo:

* Historical imagery, i.e. all of the past splash screens, screen shots of
past QGIS versions, etc.

* All versions of the QGIS app icon, and any current working concepts for
it.

* SVG Symbols. While github should not be used as a CDN, a duplicate repo
(@ hub.qgis.org?) could be used as a backend to serve SVG symbols directly
to QGIS installs.

Example:
QGIS ships with basic set of SVG symbols. User clicks a 'Download more
symbols' button and a web view of the generated image gallery of the
qgis-graphics repo symbol section  pops up, where the user can browse the
symbols (same as gh-pages) and click on download links for groups of
symbols (auto-zip archived), or individual symbols. Those links would
actually point to the mirrored qgis-graphics repo somewhere on QGIS project
servers. The links are processed by a QGIS slot that downloads them and
installs in the user's default symbol location. Other users can send pull
requests against that symbol section of the qgis-graphics github repo to
have their designed symbols 'automatically' included in the browse-able
symbols.

Sorry for the long post. Regards,

Larry
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