Re: Icon sizes for menus
Joey Hess <joey@kite.ml.org> writes:
>
> Chris Walker:
> > Is there a standard size for the icons that appear on menus generated by
> > the menu package? If not, and I couldn't find any mention in the docs, I
> > think we should give it some thought as it will make the system hold
> > together better.
>
> I agree. I've been meaning to come up with a proposal for icon sizes and
> also for the set of colors that all icons in the menus should share. But I
> haven't come up with anything concrete yet.
>
> Here are some of the common sizes out there:
>
> 16x16 -- windows 95 size, I think.
> 32x32 -- standard win 3.11 size, so there are lots of icons out there in
> this size.
> 48x48 -- isn't this size used for afterstep/nextstep? There are some very nice
> icons in this size, but they tend to use lots of colors. There's
> also a bit of a copyright problem -- you can't use nextstep's icons.
> (I hear they are being removed from afterstep.)
>
> I think we can just pick a maximum size and anything that size or smaller is
> allowed.
I'd suggest that at least the first two sizes should be supplied, in
an ideal World, but then - that's what we're aiming at.
fvwm95, and I suppose the other window managers in the fvwm2 family,
will quite happily display any size of icon in the menus, allocating
any necessary space for that item.
The smaller icons (16x16) make excellent window manager decorations
('TitleIcon'), and I prefer that size in menus. The 32x32 size can be
used in menus too, and make good icons for toolbars, application
launchers, and X windows icons. And if the XClass desktop continues
developing, then they will also be ideal for desktop shortcuts.
Do we have any GIMP experts? Can we distribute a GIMP colourmap with
the menu package? I know Netscape has a predefined colourmap - is it
too big for our purposes? The standard Win95 icons manage to look
good on a 16 colour display.
If we distribute pixmaps with names such as 'pixmap.{16|32|48}.xpm',
then I'll happily hack fvwm95 to look for the appropriate file (and
fall back!) depending on a dynamic preferred icon size setting.
Happy developing!
Kenny.
PS. The latest LJ arrived this morning - an excellent letter praising
Debian from a user, and the XBanner article was written on a Debian
box. It would have been nice if the author had mentioned the Debian
XBanner package in the article, but at least the screen shots had the
'Debian GNU/Linux' xdm login :)
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