Re: svn icons in the toolbar

[tomas]

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On Mon, Sep 03, 2007 at 08:56:51PM -0400, Richard Stallman wrote:
>     Aesthetically, the XPM icons may be serviceable for a fallback but they 
>     aren't "good enough" when the other programs on your desktop are using 
>     PNG or SVG icons.
> 
> Why do you think XPM icons are not good enough?
> What is better about the PNG or SVG icons?

PNG: mainly alpha channel. Basically a "fourth" colour carrying
transparency information (in PNG with the same resolution as the other
three colour channels, what means that the image can be more-or-less
transparent at each pixel).

SVG: scaling. You don't have to support one set of icons for each
resolution. That said, I haven't managed to like the SVG icons offered
by the usual desktop environments. I use PNGs whenever possible :-/

> Does Emacs do scaling of toolbar icons?
> If so, when, and why is it important?

Since screen resolutions and user preferences vary quite a bit, there is
a need to support different "sized" (meaning the pixel size) icon sets.
Or just provide scalable icons and let the rendering engine do that
dynamically.

[...]

> I don't understand this -- what are "alpha channels"?  Maybe I
> understand "anti-aliasing to the background", but the background for
> the toolbar is trivial, right?

Right. There must be code in place to do that (on every theme change).

Regards
- -- tomás
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