Several related cross platform icon issues

[David Mathog]

There are several icon related differences and issues noted at revision 15387 on Linux (Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, 32 bit) when compared to revision 15016 Windows XP (32 bit).

Refer to the screen shot attachment which shows Windows r15016 in the upper left with Linux r15387 superimposed over it in the lower right. In both cases the settings in:

   edit -> preferences -> interface

were

   toolbox icon size: small
   control bar icon size: small
   secondary toolbar icons size: small

referred to below as "small, small, small".

1. Windows icons are packed more tightly than on Linux. I prefer the tight packing, but whatever the packing is, it should be consistent between platforms. The packing change seems to be related to a change in the size of the bounding box around each icon, which differs between the platforms. Changing the "toolbox icon size" from large to small makes the icons smaller in both platforms, but on Linux the spacing is still too large.

Measurements were made on the rectangle icon on the same 1280 x 1024 display on the Windows box, connected to the Linux box in a remote session over X11. Linux version: the icon is 5.5 mm wide in a 14mm wide box (inner edge of outer frame to thin grey line separating the ruler) with "large, small, small", and 4.5mm wide in a 12mm wide box with "small, small, small". Windows version: that same icon with "large, small, small" is 5.5m wide in an 11mm wide box (inner edge of outer frame to closest part of the ruler) and 4.0mm wide in a 10mm wide box with "small, small, small". For "small, small, small" the space between the bottom of the rectangle draw icon and the 3d box draw icon is 2.5mm on Windows and 5mm on Linux.

2. Windows uses Inkscape's rotate and flip icons (dark triangle to grey triangle with arrow)
whereas on Linux these icons are from some system theme. I want the Inkscape icons even if the OS theme has an equivalently named icon, as apparently does Linux.

3. There appears to be no trivial way to do "get icon info" in the running program, which would include the source file name, in order to figure out where the icon image came from.

4. Inkscape does not appear to include in icons.svg a set of icons for the common actions like "open" or "cut", these always come from the OS. Consequently there seems to be no way to get a completely consistent "look and feel" in Inkscape between platforms (counting only the elements within the bounding window frame provided by the platform). I suggest that these icons be added and preferences enhanced with a "use Inkscape [x] OS [] icons" radio selection to control which has preference.

5. In the linux version some of the icons from the OS have a grey box around them, whereas others do not. For instance, the rotate left 90 degrees icon has the grey box, the cut (scissors) icon does not. There are no such grey boxes in Windows.

6. In the Windows version (at least the one I built at that release) some of the OS icons were not found and a default icon is shown. Examples: redo, undo. Note that these two were also grey bounded on Linux (issue 5).

7. Under edit -> preferences -> System the "icon" field shows a list of directories, but it is not editable (on Linux anyway), nor is there any indication where those values are coming from or even how they interact. I could not figure out the source. In addition, on my linux system "/usr/local/share/inkscape/icons" is listed twice in the list:

/root/.local/share/icons
  /root/.icons
  /usr/local/share/icons
  /usr/share/icons
  /usr/local/share/pixmaps
  /usr/share/pixmaps
  /root/.local/share/inkscape/icons
  /usr/local/share/inkscape/icons <-----------
  /usr/share/inkscape/icons
  /root/.config/inkscape/icons
  /usr/local/share/inkscape/icons <-----------
  /usr/local/share/icons

On Linux, creating a /root/.icons directory, moving everything from /usr/local/inkscape/icons into it, and restarting the application did not result in the Inkscape provided rotate and flip icons being displayed, the system icons were still used. So the choice of icons is not simply which was encountered first, as the list shown suggests.