[Qgis-developer] Ideas on the SVG symbols library

[Olivier Dalang]

Hi !

Here are some thoughs about the SVG symbols library.

Currently, some of the pictograms come with a blue frame, some with a black
frame, some with a colourised frame and some with no frame at all.
There's some redundancy between the symbols (for instance the "airport"
symbol, which exists several time with different stroke/color).
There are some composed pictograms, but other are missing (there's an
"indoor swimming pool" but no "indoor skating rink")

Since the symbology allows for multiple layers, providing the pictograms
without the rounded square would allow for a much more flexible use :
- put the pictogram in another shape (no shape, circle, square, etc...)
- independently set the colors and the strokes of the pictogram and the
background shape
- compose pictograms together or with other elements (glyphs...)
- easier to add items by simply loading a pictogram

The main drawback I see is for beginners : they'd have to understand that
it's possible to have two layers before being able to have nice symbols.
But that could be managed by having a two-layer symbol by default.
I guess that if for the sake of backwards-compatibility, it would be a bad
idea to completely remove the current images. Would there be a way to
regroup all the old symbols in a folder where we'd keep old icons ?

If we don't go this way, we could at least try to make most symbols support
the "fill" and "outline" parameters (see http://hub.qgis.org/issues/3269 ).
This feature could even be improved by replacing the "fill" parameter by
two parameters : "foreground" and "background". Or we could use the "stroke
color" parameter for the foreground, but that wouldn't be very explicit.
Or even better : provide a table widget displaying each unique color used
in the SVG where you could override each color individually. So you could
customize the colors of any SVG, without needing to prepare it specifically
for QGis customization.

What do you think ?
Is it worth working on this ?
Did someone already start something heading in the same direction ?

Cheers,

Olivier

PS : please don't misunderstand me, most symbols look really good in the
current library, it's just that I find it a bit frustrating not being able
to customize the symbols a little more when using it...
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.osgeo.org/pipermail/qgis-developer/attachments/20130315/27351e36/attachment.html>