main window - some icons are too small in 0.92.3

[koos]

After upgrading from 0.92.2 to 0.92.3 on windows 7 with a screensize of 1024x600 I noticed some UI changes in the main window.
I also noticed that some icons have changed in size to a point that I have problems discerning them. It concerns the icons with the following captions:

Rulers:
-Toggle lock for all guides in the document

In the Statusbar:
-Toggle current layer visibility
-Lock or unlock current layer

In the Tool Controls Bar:
-When scaling objects, scale the stroke width by the same proportion
-When scaling rectangles, scale the radii of the rounded corners
-Move gradients (in fill or stroke) along with the objects
-Move patterns (in fill or stroke) along with the objects

I will provide two screenshots to demonstrate the differences.

[koos (kjniesink)]

second screenshot
to demonstrate the small icons in 0.92.3

[koos (kjniesink)]

ok,
I discovered one more icon that has also changed in size. It is in the Tool Controls Bar. It's caption reads: "When locked, change both width and height by the same proportion"

I hope this is of any help.

[LucaDC (lucadc)]

Hi koos,
please try this manual patch: backup and edit the text file "share\themes\MS-Windows\gtk-2.0\gtkrc" (starting from the installation directory), in the first line:

   gtk-icon-sizes = "gtk-menu=13,13:...

change the first two numbers in something like 16 or more:

   gtk-icon-sizes = "gtk-menu=16,16:...

Please report back which value fits you.
Thank you.

[LucaDC (lucadc)]

Another way for achieving the same result is leaving the numbers in the first line in "share\themes\MS-Windows\gtk-2.0\gtkrc" as they are and appending at the end of the same line (before the closing double quotes):

   :inkscape-decoration=16,16

or whatever numbers you like, so the line from:

   ...gtk-large-toolbar=24,24:gtk-dnd=32,32"

becomes:

   ...gtk-large-toolbar=24,24:gtk-dnd=32,32:inkscape-decoration=16,16"

(actually you can add the new option wherever you want, not necessarily at the end).
FWIS, the numbers in the inkscape-decoration option supersede the ones in the gtk-menu, at least for the small toolbar icons.

[Patrick Storz (ede123)]

@koos - are you sure the issue is specific to 0.92.3 (i.e. did not exist in 0.92.2 already)? Maybe it's a change preference? For example "Pre-render named icons" is known to cause differences in behavior.

We use the stock gtkrc shipped in gtk2 [1], which didn't change since 2008.

Also I'm not aware of any icon-related changes since 0.92.2 (but maybe I'm overlooking something...)

@LucaDC - Are these changed icon sizes more trial-and-error or are there any values that might apply universally (i.e. could be patched while building)? At some point I tried to wrap my head around it, but both, gtk as well as the Inkscape code handling icon sizes utterly confused me, so I stopped working on it again, but obviously icon sizes is a standing issue (at least on Windows), so it would be great if we can figure it out somehow.

(Then again with gtk3 everything changes, so I'm not sure how much time we should invest at this point...)

[1] https://github.com/GNOME/gtk/blob/gtk-2-24/modules/engines/ms-windows/Theme/gtk-2.0/gtkrc

[koos (kjniesink)]

Hello LucaDC and Eduard Braun,

Thank you for your replies. As you advised I had a look at the mentioned file and found some differences between the old and the new version.
0.92.2 had the following line:
gtk-icon-sizes = "gtk-menu=14,14:gtk-small-toolbar=16,16:gtk-large-toolbar=24,24:gtk-dnd=32,32:inkscape-decoration=14,14"

while 0.92.3 has the following line:
gtk-icon-sizes = "gtk-menu=13,13:gtk-small-toolbar=16,16:gtk-large-toolbar=24,24:gtk-dnd=32,32"

Both versions were from portableapps.com, to be sure I also tested 0.92.3 from inkscape.org and this installation has the following line:
gtk-icon-sizes = "gtk-menu=13,13:gtk-small-toolbar=16,16:gtk-large-toolbar=24,24:gtk-dnd=32,32"

After changing this, the icon sizes went back to the old situation (for both the portableapps.com and inkscape.org installations).

[LucaDC (lucadc)]

@Eduard,
for me it's been trial-and-error, I don't know how gtk interprets the numbers, what I've seen is that the same numbers yeld different sizes in Windows XP Classic theme and Windows 7 so I need two different gtkrc files for them (14,14 for XP, 18,18 for 7, and with these the icons look a bit bigger than how they should). I don't have any Windows 8.1 nor Windows 10 installations to try and see if they behave like in Windows 7; if, as I expect, this is the case then I wouldn't spend time in understanding why Windows XP has a different behavior.

@koos,
thank you for the check, I wasn't sure that my old files came from the repository, I remember I had changed them by hand but I also reported the changes so they should have been incorporated at some time. Don't know why and how they got lost.

[LucaDC (lucadc)]

I'm a bit puzzled...
I just rechecked the two situations in Windows XP and Windows 7 putting the same numbers in the inkscape-decoration option and I get the same results.
So I wrote something wrong in my last comment.

Also, I've realized that the numbers in the gtk-menu option and in the inkscape-decoration don't share the same scale: a 14 in the inkscape-decoration is a good choice IMHO but it's not in the gtk-menu (you have to remove the inkscape-decorations option to make it effective). This has probably been the source of my confusion.

So the old 0.92.2 line seems to be the preferable solution in all situations:

   gtk-icon-sizes = "gtk-menu=14,14:gtk-small-toolbar=16,16:gtk-large-toolbar=24,24:gtk-dnd=32,32:inkscape-decoration=14,14"

[LucaDC (lucadc)]

Reading again my last comment I want to clarify: IMHO 14 is a good choice in the gtk-menu option for the menu icons but it's not for the toolbar icons when the inskcape-decoration option is missing. Obviously increasing the gtk-menu (with inkscape-decoration missing) to fix the toolbar icons makes the icons in menus too big.
So to have the best of the two, both the gtk-menu and the inkscape-decoration have to be present and 14 seems a good value for both.

[Hachmann (marenhachmann)]

Offtopic, but I've already wondered about this before:
Is the 'portableapps.com' download file the same as the one that is provided from the inkscape.org website?

[koos (kjniesink)]

I can confirm that the file "share\themes\MS-Windows\gtk-2.0\gtkrc" is the same for both from portableapps.com and from inkscape.org for version 0.92.3.