ooo-thumbnailer should use icons from the current icon theme

[migash.r]

Binary package hint: ooo-thumbnailer

ooo-thumbnailer adds an ODF document icon in the lower right corner of the thumbnail. That part works fine, but:

Expected behaviour:
ooo-thumbnailer should use icons from the current icon theme.

Actual behaviour:
ooo-thumbnailer is hardcoded to use icons from the hicolor theme, which are:
a) quite hard to tell apart - at first I thought it uses the same icon for all the documents.
b) rather fugly - the hicolor theme's ODF icons look like they're from the early 1990's, and make the desktop environment feel inconsistent.

---
Ubuntu release: 10.10
ooo-thumbnailer version: 0.2-5ubuntu1 (latest version from Ubuntu repos)

[migash.r (migash-r)]

I have tried to write a patch, but I can't find the path to the current icon theme. Using
$ /usr/share/icons/`gconftool-2 -g /desktop/gnome/interface/icon_theme`
is no good, because the Ubuntu's default theme ubuntu-mono-dark contains only a handful of icons, while the rest are pulled from the Humanity icon theme. A quick google search didn't turn up anything useful on how to locate the actual icon in use.

So far, I only managed to change the hardcoded paths to use the Humanity icons - but that's just a workaround. A diff is attached.

[David D Lowe (flimm)]

Thanks for the bug report. You're right, it is a problem, but the solution is a bit more difficult than just changing the script to reading the current theme. The trouble is that thumbnails do not refresh when the user changes icon theme.

[migash.r (migash-r)]

Yeah, I thought that might be a problem. I suggest doing one of these things:

1. Keep the icons hardcoded but either to the default icon theme, or to the official ooo/lo icons.
2. Have the thumbnailer only do the thumbnailing - the document icon can be automatically added as an emblem by nautilus. Nautilus automatically pulls the icons from the theme correctly, and refreshes them when the theme changes. However, this has to be done in Nautilus, not ooo-thumbnailer. The good thing is that this could be extended to other kinds of documents, say PDF files or even images.

1. is the easy way, while 2. is more complicated, and might require help and/or approval of the Nautilus devs. I'd personally prefer the second one, I can offer my (somewhat limited) skills.

[David D Lowe (flimm)]

I've asked upstream about it, and Nautilus' lead developer has already replied:

http://mail.gnome.org/archives/nautilus-list/2011-April/msg00006.html

[David D Lowe (flimm)]

Please note that development of ooo-thumbnailer has stopped and it is no longer maintained.