Hi List,
I'm working on a continuous little project of mine -- namely, trying
to learn how to build GUI applications using GTK+. My current concern
is icons, and I have run into some AFAICT undocumented problems.
* The icons on stock buttons like `Add' and `New' (created using
libglade) look bad. This seems to be because Glade or GTK+ wants
the icons to be 20x20 pixels in size, but the stock icons do not
come in this size. What's baffling about this is that, e.g.,
Bluecurve *does* carry all the icons in this size; it just doesn't
declare them in its `iconrc' file.
Owen hastily tried to explain this to me on IRC yesterday, but I
have not really been able to figure out what he meant. I wrote:
``How come the iconrc for Bluecurve in the redhat-artwork package
doesn't define, for instance, a 20x20 stock `New' icon, or a
16x16 stock `Close' icon? I mean, all the icons are there, but
most icon/size combinations just aren't defined in the rc file.
This results in, e.g., ugly `New' buttons.''
Owen replied:
``The most recent version of the RC file is suppoesd to
*exactly* match the sizes provided by the default GTK+ theme.
Really, with GTK+-2.4, the icon RC file just needs to be
deleted.''
I'm guessing that the RC file stock icon declarations are being
phased out in favor of the kind of lookups described by the Icon
Theme Specification[1]. If so, then I suppose that is what Owen
was referring to. However, I don't see how I can use this with
GTK+ stock items, because the stock icons seem to break if I
delete the icon RC file.
If I give up trying to use the stock items, I can get good looking
icons by manually fetching them from a GtkIconTheme and packing
them with labels into buttons. I would be satisfied with this, if
it weren't for my next problem.
* The Bluecurve theme from the redhat-artwork package[2] calls its
icons hyphenated names like `stock-connect', `stock-new', and
`stock-zoom-out', while, e.g., the gnome theme from the
gnome-icon-theme package[3] instead uses names like
`stock_connect', `stock_new', and and `stock_zoom-out'.
This seems to mean that the `stock_foo-bar' style will be more
portable, but the `stock-foo-bar' style will look better when
using Bluecurve. Here, I'm quite confident that I do not
understand what is going on, because this dilemma seems too
ridiculous to be true.
If someone could shed some light to these issues, or point me to a
good example of an application that uses icons properly, that would be
completely awesome.
Thanks,
--
Daniel Brockman
drlion@xxxxxxxxxxxx
[1] http://www.freedesktop.org/Standards/icon-theme-spec
[2] http://rpm.pbone.net/index.php3/stat/4/idpl/1371513/com/
redhat-artwork-0.97-1.0.2.kde.i386.rpm.html
[3] http://cvs.gnome.org/viewcvs/gnome-icon-theme/
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