[racket-dev] Icons issues

On 12/05/2011 02:49 PM, Robby Findler wrote:
> Matthew, Neil, and I have been talking about how to resolve the
> dependency problem. I think that the our thinking was that the best
> plan is to break out a "pict" library that both slideshow and drracket
> can safely depend on, and have the icons library depend on that.

Yes. Then DrRacket could build its icons as it currently does, by 
combining primitive icons. Updating the primitive icons would only 
require changing the SVG sources and re-rendering the PNGs.

> We didn't consider putting some of it into 'meta', tho. That makes a
> lot of sense to me. Neil, Matthew, how does that sound?

It could be the wrong thing to do in the future.

I don't think it would help much now with size, if that's the issue, 
because the SVGs are only 400-800K uncompressed. (As XML, they compress 
well.) PNG renderings of the SVG icons in various colors and at various 
sizes take up almost all the space, and these have to be in any 
distribution that includes icons/main.rkt.

If Racket could render SVGs, we could save space in every distribution, 
allow icons to be arbitrarily colorized, and render them at arbitrary 
sizes instead of just sizes between 8 and 64. This would also make it 
wrong to move the SVGs to `meta'.

I briefly looked into rendering SVGs just now. Apparently, Cairo can't 
do it natively. We'd need to use a third-party library like librsvg. 
Alternatively, I could make partial support for SVG rendering into a 
holiday project, for after the FLOPS deadline. I think our dc<%>s and 
brushes can handle everything in the icon SVGs except blur, which isn't 
strictly needed.

At any rate, SVG-backed picts would be useful for more than just icons.

> Name: I think it is called the icons collection because that's where
> the icons were before when Neil generalized things.

Right. The logos were already there.

> We could make a
> 'sprites' collection and then move maybe even move planetcute into
> that collection?

I'd be okay with a `sprites' collection: `sprites/planetcute', 
`sprites/icons', `sprites/logos', etc.

> On Mon, Dec 5, 2011 at 1:35 PM, Eli Barzilay<eli at barzilay.org>  wrote:
>> * The "Making New SVG Icons" section should really be elsewhere -- and
>>   IMO, this kind of text should go into some readme file...

I agree. It's on my to-do list now.

>> * And a minor picky point: when I compare
>>   "magnifying-glass-left-shiny.svg" and
>>   "magnifying-glass-left-diffuse.svg", they are both cropped at the
>>   top (at least the way that they're rendered in Emacs),

That's odd. They shouldn't be. Their page sizes are the same as every 
other icon, so I'd say the problem is in whatever library Emacs uses to 
render them.

>>   but in
>>   addition they're at different places (which is visible in the PNG
>>   rendered files too).  I wouldn't have pointed it out, but it might
>>   be some bug in your rendering script.

I centered the icon using the entire picture, but centering it using 
just the magnifying glass (without the handle) is worth trying.

Neil T