Re: Icon sizes for menus
Kenneth MacDonald:
> 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.
Sounds good. Low-quality 16x16 icons can be made easily and automatically
with imagemagic or similar programs, by scaling down the larger icons.
Of course, ideally you would touch up the result.
> 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.
I was thinking perhaps the menu package docs could include a xpm file with
the colormap we come up with in it. xpm files are easy to read (as text
files, even).
It's an open question how many colors should be in the color map. Windows
has proved that you can use 16 colors and look good. Perhaps since we arn't
all graphic experts who can make pretty pictures in so few colors, it should
be expanded to 32 or so.
If we did pick a colormap that match the one used by netscpae, would
netscape (and other programs) actually share colors from it? I didn't think
they could.
It should be possible to wrote a program that reduces an existing image to
our chosen colormap. I think that fvwm comes with such a program. Or course,
hand treaking after running the program would be a good idea.
> 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.
The menu program could probably handle something similar. There is currently
a entry in the menu files for the icon to use, which is right now the full
filename of the icon. Maybe that could be changed to just be the basename of
the icon, and "16|32.xpm" gets tacked on the end to generate the actual icon
filename.
> 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 :)
I maintain xbanner, and I worked closely with the upstream author in getting
the debian package set up. I think that he had already submitted the article
by the time I got the package out, so you can blame me that the article
doesn't point to it. You can also blame me for the currently (IMHO) ugly
'Debian GNU/Linux' xdm login. ;-)
--
#!/usr/bin/perl -pl- # ,,ep) ayf >|)nj,,
$_=reverse lc$_;s@"@''@g;y/[]{A-U}<>()a-y1-9,!.?`'/][} # Joey Hess
{><)(eq)paj6y!fk7wuodbjsfn^mxhl5Eh29L86`i'%,/;s@k@>|@g # joey@kite.ml.org
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