Re: Add Tango and Adwaita icons for the toolbar

[Po Lu]

Yuan Fu <casouri@gmail.com> writes:

> Hey guys,
>
> I followed the original tool-bar icon thread in 2022. At the time I
> didn’t have much time and I personally prefer colorful icons for the
> tool bar [1] (IMO mono-colored symbolic icons are more suitable for
> inline, small icons), so I didn’t do anything except for observing the
> discussion.
>
> [1] I especially adore the life ring icon for help! Whatever icon set
> we use for the tool-bar, the help icon should always be a cute life
> ring :-)
>
> The recent Emacs app icon thread reminded me of that thread, and I do
> have time now. So, I went ahead and searched for the Tango and Adwaita
> icons (basically the high-res version of the existing tool-bar icon
> that we use), then converted them to be suitable for Emacs tool-bar.
>
> About 1/3 of the icons can be directly taken from Tango or Adwaita,
> the rest I have to modify or kind of take apart and
> re-assemble. Anyway, in the end I managed to get most of the basic
> icons covered. For details see etc/images/scalable/README.
>
> You can see the attached screenshots for the current built-in icons
> and the new icons. I also attached the patch for it. You want to
> rebuild or byte-compile tool-bar.el for the new icons to take effect.
>
> I hope these new icons won’t be controversial. As you can see, they
> are basically straight high-res upgrades for the existing icons. There
> are many imperfections that’ll be atrocious in the eyes of a graphic
> designer—I did the conversion work in an afternoon and I’m no where
> near a graphic designer; but it’s definitely an upgrade and we can
> always incrementally improve after.

They will not be controversial if it is possible to opt out of them, and
enough of the icons are replaced that none of us encounter tool-bars
bearing an unsightly mixture of old and new.  That is to say:

Please generate XPM and monochrome PBM versions of the new icons
introduced, these being the only two image formats implemented without
dependencies in image.c, and enable SVG only on systems where the
scalable versions produce a visible improvement to image quality.
Finally, please see that _all_ major modes are covered by this new icon
set, including but not limited to message-mode, Doc View,
xwidget-webkit, and anywhere else a custom tool-bar-map is defined, and
that there is means of reverting to the old set of icons, for users who
are so inclined.

The PBM icons should not be unmodified ImageMagick output, they should
be modified for legibility on actual monochrome displays.  The other day
there was a post to help-gnu-emacs from an Android user with a
monochrome display, so these configurations are by no means irrelevant.

> If no one objects, I’ll happily push this to master.

Nobody objects to these icons in principle, but do not push such changes
until they are complete and have been tested by an adequately wide
audience.  Let it not be forgotten that we are still contending with the
fallout from another enormously premature change.