Panel resizing

[Ted Gould]

On Fri, 2007-11-16 at 21:14 +1300, Matthew Paul Thomas wrote:
> On Nov 16, 2007, at 6:42 PM, Ted Gould wrote:
> > Because all of the icons sizes are SVG, we can scale them within
> > specific ranges and it's like that they'll look pretty good, most users
> > wouldn't notice.  The next step would to be starting to do things like
> > "pixel fitting" rendering of the SVGs.  ClearType for graphics.
> 
> Or hinting for graphics, at least. (Roughly, ClearType is about the 
> rendering of all those lines and curves that *weren't* pixel-fitted.)

And that's approximately what we'd have to do.  SVG doesn't really have
the idea of what the pixel grid is that it's rendering to.  And then
when we start to scale even the pixel grid the artist thought they were
rendering to changes.  So, then we end up at the point of having to do
roughly the same thing as ClearType, fixing things afterwards shifting
stuff around.

> > I don't know of anyone doing this today -- it'd be tricky to say the 
> > least.
> > ...
> 
> Mac OS X does this for GUI controls. So just as serifs in a hinted font 
> become proportionately smaller as the size increases, in GUI controls 
> outlines become proportionately thinner as the size increases.
> <http://arstechnica.com/reviews/os/mac-os-x-10-5.ars/10> (That's why I 
> said "To make things other than the panel resolution-independent is 
> quite a bit more complicated".)

GTK+ themes do approximately this same things (depending on the engine)
so we're already there.  They know what resolution they're rendering at,
and have programatic ways of dealing with this.  So, in theory, all your
GTK+ widgets should be resolution independent already.

> OS X doesn't do this for application icons, though, because they use a 
> scaling-resilient icon style instead
> <http://images.appleinsider.com/leopard-launch-gal-4.png> combined with 
> a decent icon resizing algorithm.

So, what you're saying is that I can blame the artists for this? ;)


In a nutshell, I don't believe that we're that far off from the pieces
we need to make this look good.  Yes, in theory it can work better, but
for most users we can make a good experience with what we have.

		--Ted

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