Menu icons don't scale with font size

[Ted Gould]

The messaging menu and system menu currently use GTK_ICON_SIZE_MENU for the size of their icons. Unfortunately, GTK_ICON_SIZE_MENU does not change when the system font size changes, and is apparently hard-coded inside GTK.

There should be a signal when the font size changes, gnome-settings-daemon should update gtk-icon-sizes to reflect the new size, and menus should be redrawn automatically.

<http://developer.gnome.org/gtk3/stable/GtkSettings.html#GtkSettings--gtk-icon-sizes>

[Kenneth Wimer (kwwii)]

All panel icons and panel menu icons should use 22px width icons.

[Kenneth Wimer (kwwii)]

LOL, all panel icons and panel menu icons should use 22px HEIGHT icons, width should be variable. Duh!

[Matthew Paul Thomas (mpt)]

I propose that for consistency, except in exceptional circumstances, every menu item that has an icon should be the same height as an item that doesn't have an icon.

The "Applications" and "Places" menus used to be exceptional circumstances, because almost every item in those menus was a launcher (the Windows Start menu made every item oversized for the same reason). But now that those menus are being retired, any inconsistency elsewhere -- such as in the messaging and sound menus -- would be even more obvious.

At the default font size, Nautilus's "Open With" submenu and "Places" menu have nice examples of icons that don't make their items any taller. Unfortunately, in Ubuntu 10.10 at least, the icons don't increase when the font size does.

So, I think the ideal approach would be to change whatever constant or function programs like Nautilus use, so that the icon is the same size as it is now in the default font size, but scales up as the font size increases. And then to use that same constant or function for the messaging and sound menus.

[Lars Karlitski (larsu)]

What's the status on this?

Matthew's proposal in comment #3 (all menu items with icons should have the same height as those without icons) is now true for all indicators as far as I can see.

The original description is about the icons having a specific size different from the one we use now. Is this still relevant?

[Otus (jan-varho)]

Not fixed, in Precise at least.

Try changing the system font size, looking at the Nautilus 'Go' menu or 'Open with' in the context menu. AFAICT the icons stay the same size regardless of font size. With font size smaller than the default, the menu items with icons are larger and with larger font the icons look tiny.

(You can see this using the small and large text size from accessibility, but it is clearer with system font sizes 5 and 20 from e.g. myunity.)

[Conscious User (conscioususer)]

I'm not 100% sure on this, but this might not be very easy to patch. If I remember correctly, icon sizes are read just once and never again. I think simply changing the constant would work for *new* icons, but wouldn't auto-resize the ones already rendered.

It's worth mentioning that the GNOME HIG itself hardcodes icon sizes:

http://developer.gnome.org/hig-book/3.5/icons-types.html.en

so I wouldn't be surprised if implementing auto-resizing is not very easy.

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.