[texworks] About the Icon Design (was: Icon Update)

[Reinhard Kotucha]

On 11 July 2009 Jonathan Kew wrote:

 > On 11 Jul 2009, at 19:31, Stefan Löffler wrote:
 > 
 > > Hi,
 > >
 > > I just wanted to give you a short overview over what I think an
 > > icon should and should not be. From this, it hopefully becomes
 > > clear why I did what I did and you can persuade me to the
 > > contrary ;).
 > 
 > Haha :) ..... well, maybe I can try, but I'd be glad to hear some  
 > other people's opinions too. Thanks for your comments, it's really  
 > helpful to discuss and think about this stuff.

Jonathan, I dislike the strong outline too.  But this can be changed
easily.

The advantage of Stefan's second approach is that it's vector
graphics.  If you only need the icon for buttons, bitmaps are fine.
But if you want to use it anywhere else (documentation, conference
papers,...), scalable graphics are a must.  Inkscape is a nice tool
because it uses the cairo library which supports many output formats.
In addition to SVG, it can create other vector formats like EPS and
PDF, which are supported by (pdf)tex natively.  Cairo can also create
bitmaps if needed.

The most interesting point is that once you have created an SVG file,
you can regard it as "the master source".  It doesn't even matter
which program produced it.

Yes, it's definitely worthwhile to have the master sources in a
standard, scalable, and portable format, and SVG is probably the best
choice.  I don't know how difficult it is to achieve the "inky"
surface in Inkscape, but I'm sure that it's worthwhile to investigate.

Regards,
  Reinhard

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