Re: [lmi] Showing better icons in high DPI

[Vadim Zeitlin]

On Wed, 16 Feb 2022 10:29:07 +0000 Greg Chicares <gchicares@sbcglobal.net> 
wrote:

GC> On 2022-02-16 01:06, Vadim Zeitlin wrote:
GC> > On Wed, 12 Jan 2022 00:58:14 +0000 Greg Chicares 
<gchicares@sbcglobal.net> wrote:
GC> > 
GC> > GC> On 1/11/22 11:05 PM, Vadim Zeitlin wrote:
GC> > GC> > 
GC> > GC> >  One of the important new features in (the still not released but 
really
GC> > GC> > close to being to, this time for real) wx 3.1.6 is the possibility 
to
GC> > GC> > define bitmaps of different sizes for the same "logical" bitmap in
GC> > GC> > different resolutions. I.e. instead of scaling up a 16x16 bitmap by 
a
GC> > GC> > factor of 2 when using 200% DPI scaling or, worse, scaling it up by 
a
GC> > GC> > factor of 1.5, which looks really ugly, when using 150% scaling, the
GC> > GC> > application can define 16x16 bitmap, 32x32 bitmap and 24x24 bitmap 
and the
GC> > GC> > appropriate one will be selected during run-time
GC> > GC> 
GC> > GC> BTW, in gwc/16/ and gwc/24/ we have gnome originals of various icons
GC> > GC> that have been copied or adapted for lmi. Their provenance is given in
GC> > GC> 'README'; perhaps gnome has SVG versions.
GC> > 
GC> >  Following up on this turned out to be much more interesting (in the
GC> > notorious Chinese proverb sense) than I could have imagined. [...big 
snip...]
GC> If you want to send some screenshots to my personal email, I'd be
GC> glad to take a look.

 If I chop off the most problematic icons, I can even post the screenshots
publicly, so let me do it here: attached are 3 screenshots showing lmi on a
high DPI (200% scaling) screen. The first one shows lmi using the current
wx version from lmi repository (~3.1.4). It doesn't look too bad here, but
the bitmaps are noticeably blocky and, probably worse, all text except for
the "lmi" in the title bar, which is rendered by OS itself, is not very
sharp. Not shown here, but things like checkboxes (i.e. anything with thin
lines) also look blurry.

 The second screenshot shows how lmi looks when built with the latest wx
(~3.1.6) and DPI awareness enabled. Everything looks sharp now (except for
the icon in the title bar which is not available in the required 64x64
size, but I'll change this), but the toolbar bitmaps are too small. We
could, however, change icon_monger code to scale them up, but then we'd get
about the same appearance as in the first screenshot (maybe not exactly the
same as the OS might do a better job of scaling than wxImage code).

 The final screenshot shows lmi with the same wx version and my extra
changes to icon_monger to use SVG icons from Gnome theme. IMO they look
well enough even if the "Save to PDF" one (which I made myself by
overlapping an existing item with a PDF emblem) is noticeably worse than
the others.

GC> Going by the narrative description only, it
GC> sounds like this could take a great deal of effort,

 To me, yes, but just because I have neither the artistic talent to draw
something decent myself nor technical competences needed to use Inkscape to
combine the existing items to make something reasonable. But it's, of
course, only my own fault and I should probably take some time to learn to
use Inkscape rather than just winging it.

 Sorry if I frightened you too much, rereading my last email, I realize
that I should have cooled off after my struggles with Inkscape before
writing it because it turned out more like a rant when my real motivation
for writing it was to ask you whether you'd be going through all these
images yourself anyhow, in which case I probably shouldn't try too hard to
make them better, or if you'd be happy with my versions if I did do my best
to make them presentable?

GC> yet produce results that aren't really satisfying.

 If these screenshots are not good enough, we should provide more sizes for
the PNG icons. Of course, the simplest way to do it would still be to take
Gnome SVG icons and just rasterize the appropriate versions of them in the
smaller sizes (what I use now is the biggest version, with the most
details).

GC> Should we consider dropping the idea, and just keeping what we have?

 I think the current icons look very noticeably scaled in the first
screenshot and wouldn't want to use them in high DPI. Using SVGs also has
the extra advantage of allowing to adapt the icon sizes exactly to the
expected size, even when using 150% or 250% or other weird DPI scaling (and
it turns out that people do use 125% and 175% and even 350% in practice).
With PNGs, unless we provide them in all those sizes, the bitmaps would be
smaller than needed at 125% scaling and bigger than needed at 150% because
wx prefers to use the wrong size rather than scale them (which is really
the best thing to do, as scaling by a factor different from 2 looks very
ugly).


 But please let me know what do you think and, notably, whether you have
any plans to work on these icons yourself or not.

 Thanks in advance,
VZ

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