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Icon themes for PIKA

Released Themes

PIKA 3.0 comes with 3 icon themes:

Symbolic: the default icon theme which is vector and which will be automatically recolored to your theme colors.

We follow GNOME guidelines when possible.
Color: the color icon theme, also designed with vector graphics, yet it won't be recolored.
Legacy: icon theme which contains the old PIKA 2.8's raster icons (mostly untouched ever since PIKA 2.10). It is not maintained anymore and we are not expecting new icons for Legacy. Yet since we keep them in the source tree for now, we would accept updates.

The Symbolic icon theme is our main target since they are considered better suited for graphics work (less visual distraction). Color icons are kept as fall-back since some users prefer them.

Vector icons are now prefered because they are much less maintenance. For instance, we do not need to double, triple (or more) every icon for the various sizes they are needed in, and double this amount again to handle high density displays. Yet if anyone cared enough for a complete raster icon theme to get the Legacy icon theme back in shape, add high density icon variants and stay around, it could even get back to maintenance state. Be aware it is a lot of work and we'd expect contributors ready to maintain support to the icons as the software evolve.

Adding new icons

Add new icons in the single SVG file inside their respective directories, i.e. symbolic-scalable.svg for symbolic icons and color-scalable.svg for color icons.

A single file allows easier reuse of material, and easy overview of all existing icons which simplifies consistent styling…
The contents of the SVG file should be organized for easy management and easy contribution. You can visually group similar icons, make use of layers, whatever is necessary for organization.
You should group all parts of a single icon into a single object and id this object with the icon name. For instance the object containing the Move Tool icon should be id-ed: "pika-tool-move".
Make sure the object has the right expected size. A good trick is to group with a square of the right size, made invisible.
Export the icon as SVG into the scalable/ directory.

Ideally this step should be done at build time, but we could not find yet a reliable way to extract icons out of the single SVG file without using crazy build dependencies (like Inkscape). So this is done by hand for the time being.

Please make sure that you provide both the Symbolic as well as the Color icons. You are welcome to add a raster version for Legacy, but this is not mandatory anymore.

Add the icons in relevant listing files in icons/icon-lists/ then run touch icons/Color/meson.build icons/Symbolic/meson.build to force-trigger their re-processing (hence re-configuration) at next build. Otherwise even with image list changed, meson might not see it as it uses the list from the last configuration.

Pixel perfection

Even as vector images, icons could be pixel-perfect when possible. Therefore the first step before making an icon is to determine which size it is supposed to appear at. If the icon could appear in several sizes:

if the sizes are multiples, just design the smaller size. The bigger icon will stay pixel-perfect when scaled by a multiple. So for instance, if you want the icon to be 12x12 and 24x24, just design the 12x12 icon.
of course, if the size difference is big enough, you may want to create a new version with added details, even when this is a multiple (i.e. 12x12 and 192x192 may be different designs). These are design choices.
when sizes are no multiple (i.e. 16x16 and 24x24), it is preferred to have 2 pixel-perfect versions.
if time is missing, creating the smaller size only is a first step and is acceptable.

Note that since our maintained icons are currently vector, we only design them once and scale the icon for all sizes at runtime. This is an easy-maintenance choice. We are not against pixel-perfection, even of vector icons, but once again if a contributor wants to embark in such a journey, we'd expect them to stay for continuous maintenance.

Colors in Symbolic icon theme

By default, colors in the Symbolic icon theme don't matter as they will be changed by the foreground and background colors of the theme. Yet it is still a good idea to use the same colors for all icons in icons/Symbolic/symbolic-scalable.svg to keep visual consistency when reviewing icons.

Furthermore, there is a trick to apply hard-coded colors (i.e. which won't be recolored): add the !important flag to the color in the style SVG parameter. Then GTK will not recolor this color.

It is to be noted that (last we tested), Inkscape was not able to keep this flag, so you will likely have to edit the file manually in a text or XML editor.

For instance "pika-default-colors" and "pika-toilet-paper" icons contain such tricks. For the first one, the default colors was black and white in this specific order (it made no sense to invert them or worse to transform them into whatever other colors the theme might be using). For the second, it was considered inappropriate by some contributors to generate black toilet papers.

Other such examples are pika-color-picker-black, pika-color-picker-gray and pika-color-picker-white. . Since they are designing specific colors, it doesn't make sense to let any recoloring happen.

Sizes

Some known sizes:

tool icons: 16x16 and 22x22.
dock tab icons: 16x16 and 24x24.
menu icons: 16x16. […]

Testing icons

Menu items and buttons are not supposed to have icons any longer (except for buttons with no label at all). Yet our actions have icons and some desktop environments would enable them in menus and buttons regardless. To test how it looks on systems which do so, set the environment variable PIKA_ICONS_LIKE_A_BOSS.

For instance, start PIKA like this:

PIKA_ICONS_LIKE_A_BOSS=1 pika-2.99

Playing with low/high density

To test high (or low) density icons, without having to change the scaling factor of your whole desktop, just change the GDK_SCALE environment variable. For instance, run PIKA like this to simulate a scaling factor of 2 (every icons and text would typically double):

GDK_SCALE=2 pika-2.99

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