Subject: [Gimp-gui] About symbolic dark/light themes

From: Jehan <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 10 Nov 2015 17:36:02 +0100

Hi all,

Some time ago, Alex Prokoudine played with symbolic icons from the GNOME 
project 
(https://plus.google.com/+AlexandreProkoudine/posts/LP1pWr7YEgA). This 
kickstarted a discussion about new (potentially default, though existing 
ones should also stay) themes for GIMP, one with light background, one 
with dark background.

Then a contributor started working 
(https://mail.gnome.org/archives/gimp-developer-list/2013-October/msg00020.html) 
from this base to create new themes from these monochrome icons.
See http://www.jesusda.com/files/symbolic-gimp.7z (dark icons)
And http://www.jesusda.com/files/symbolic-gimp_light.7z (light icons)

We would be happy to finalize such themes and include them in GIMP when 
they are considered finished. I've encountered some issue having them 
work on the dev version of GIMP which uses now icon themes instead of 
including the icons from the gtkrc file (basically it seems any theme of 
GIMP using this method to change icons will be broken by GIMP 2.10). 
Unfortunately I cannot make the time to try and understand what is the 
problem since it's not my highest priority in GIMP.
If anyone is interested in the projects, know well theming and icon 
themes and can make such a theme working with GIMP (dev version), we 
welcome contributions. This could (should IMO!) still make it to GIMP 
2.10 if some people are into this.

Scl also created a wiki page when we first started discussing 
integrating it into GIMP: http://wiki.gimp.org/index.php/Specs:UI_Theme 
(on the main wiki, not the GUI wiki, it would be good if both wikis were 
merged!).

Just throwing this here, hoping some people are interested to 
contribute.

Jehan

---

From: Kevin Payne <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 10 Nov 2015 16:57:32 +0000

I'll just complicate matters by mentioning that there is demand for larger icons to suit high resolution displays:
http://gimpforums.com/thread-large-size-symbolic-icons-themes

Kevin
________________________________________
From: gimp-gui-list <[email-masked]> on behalf of Jehan <[email-masked]>
Sent: 10 November 2015 16:36
To: [email-masked]
Subject: [Gimp-gui] About symbolic dark/light themes

Hi all,

Jehan
_______________________________________________
gimp-gui-list mailing list
[email-masked]
https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/gimp-gui-list

---

From: Jehan <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 10 Nov 2015 18:02:49 +0100

Hi,

On 2015-11-10 17:57, Kevin Payne wrote:
> I'll just complicate matters by mentioning that there is demand for
> larger icons to suit high resolution displays:

For HiDPI, I hear that GTK+3 will help (not sure of the details).
For the icons, should we just provide bigger icons (as in the forum 
thread you are pointing)? Is there no support of vectorial icons in GTK+ 
(2? 3?)? This would simplify a lot of things if icons could just be 
provided as vector images.

Jehan

---

From: Alexandre Prokoudine <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 10 Nov 2015 22:03:34 +0300

10 нояб. 2015 г. 20:05 пользователь "Jehan" написал:
>  Is there no support of vectorial icons in GTK+ (2? 3?)? This would
simplify a lot of things if icons could just be provided as vector images.

At the cost of losing pixel grid alignment.

Alex

---

From: Tobias Ellinghaus <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 10 Nov 2015 21:05:43 +0100

> At the cost of losing pixel grid alignment.

Which would be less of a problem for high DPI screens where you can't see 
single pixels anyway.

> Alex

Tobias

---

From: Jehan <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 09 Dec 2015 19:37:12 +0100

Hi all,

On 2015-11-10 17:36, Jehan wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> Some time ago, Alex Prokoudine played with symbolic icons from the
> GNOME project
> kickstarted a discussion about new (potentially default, though
> existing ones should also stay) themes for GIMP, one with light
> background, one with dark background.
> 
> We would be happy to finalize such themes and include them in GIMP
> when they are considered finished. I've encountered some issue having
> them work on the dev version of GIMP which uses now icon themes
> instead of including the icons from the gtkrc file (basically it seems
> any theme of GIMP using this method to change icons will be broken by
> GIMP 2.10). Unfortunately I cannot make the time to try and understand
> what is the problem since it's not my highest priority in GIMP.
> integrating it into GIMP:
> http://wiki.gimp.org/index.php/Specs:UI_Theme (on the main wiki, not
> the GUI wiki, it would be good if both wikis were merged!).
> 

Ok so we had a contributor who fixed GIMP to select icon themes. As I 
thought, the problem of icon themes was lying within GIMP, which was not 
able to select new icon themes. This is now patched in master (more work 
is undergoing).
https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=759105

Based on this, I have added all the icons from Jakub/Barbara/jEsuSda in 
a new theme which will be automatically installed with GIMP and can be 
chosen in the preferences.
You can test to build this by checking out the branch origin/symbolic.

There is still no dark theme, but this is only a detail and will be 
extremely easy to add now.
What misses is that we are missing 49 icons (many are the same in 
various sizes, so that's less).

Who would be interested to contribute new icons?
Only requirements is accepting the GPL v3 license and following the icon 
set design style.
Also if you could work with a SVG source and providing these too, rather 
than working with bitmap sources.
Thanks!

Jehan

---

From: Pat David <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 09 Dec 2015 18:49:36 +0000

Can you link the icon set design style guide for people?
On Wed, Dec 9, 2015 at 10:39 AM Jehan <[email-masked]> wrote:

> > (
> https://mail.gnome.org/archives/gimp-developer-list/2013-October/msg00020.html
> )

---

From: Michael Natterer <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 09 Dec 2015 21:16:54 +0100

Top-posting, schumaml will kill me.

Jehan, Can you just push this to master please? We need
another theme in git in order to add code that uses the
default theme as fallback for missing icons in other
themes, and I'd like to add that code as long as there
are icons missing in "Symbolic".

But call the folders Default/ and Symbolic/, just like
we do in themes/

--Mitch

---

From: Jehan <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 09 Dec 2015 22:35:00 +0100

Hi,

> Can you link the icon set design style guide for people?

As a general way, we would follow the GNOME general UI guidelines for 
things as icons:
https://developer.gnome.org/hig/stable/icons-and-artwork.html.en

As for this specific icon set, I don't think there is a specific 
guideline other than the GNOME ones. I could find the origin repository 
there: 
https://github.com/gnome-design-team/gnome-icons/tree/master/art-libre-symbolic
Last commits are years old and it does not seem it was ever considered 
finished.

I believe we could create our own GIMP guidelines from this base, if 
needed.

For the rest, just look in the folder icons/Symbolic/ and get 
inspiration there.

Jehan

---

From: Alexandre Prokoudine <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 10 Dec 2015 00:41:04 +0300

On Thu, Dec 10, 2015 at 12:35 AM, Jehan wrote:
> As a general way, we would follow the GNOME general UI guidelines for things
> as icons:
> As for this specific icon set, I don't think there is a specific guideline
> other than the GNOME ones. I could find the origin repository there:
> I believe we could create our own GIMP guidelines from this base, if needed.
>
> For the rest, just look in the folder icons/Symbolic/ and get inspiration
> there.

Or you can just talk to Jimmac, if I may just chime in. In fact, I
forwarded your email to him. Let's see how it works out.

Alex

---

From: Jehan <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 09 Dec 2015 22:59:53 +0100

Hi,

> But call the folders Default/ and Symbolic/, just like

Done, and done.

Jehan

---

From: Jehan <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 09 Dec 2015 23:11:43 +0100

Hi,

On 2015-12-09 22:41, Alexandre Prokoudine wrote:
>> things
>> guideline
>> inspiration

Of course, we were planning to do it sooner than later. This thing 
simply came up suddenly. I pulled master earlier this afternoon, 
discovered this last commit about icon theme selection being fixed, 
tested and continued the work started years ago. It all happened in a 
matter of a few hours. :-)

> forwarded your email to him. Let's see how it works out.

Cool.
I will prepare a list of all the missing icons.

This said, even though it would be awesome if Jimmac were to fill all 
the missing icons, my goal by posting here is also to create a dynamics 
with new contributors, coders, artists (and other skills)… For this 
feature, or another.
We need fresh blood too! :D

Jehan

---

From: Andrew Pullins <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 9 Dec 2015 17:52:29 -0500

I have a very successful Icon theme that people seem to like.  My theme
gives people the options of Darker, Dark, Light, and Lighter themes.
Darker and Dark have dark panels but light icons, Light and Lighter have
light panels but dark icons.  Everything in the theme lights up GIMP Orange
when selected or hovered over.

my theme is GPL V2 but I can change that if need be, my icons are licened
under the creative commons license: to Share — to copy, distribute and
transmit the work, to Remix — to adapt the work, to make commercial use of
the work.

both licenses can be changed if need be.  All I want is for people to be
able to freely distribute it, make changes, and distribute those changes as
their own as long as they give others the same rights.

There are a few problems that I have found when making this theme.

Bug 724834 <https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=724834>: Some icons
do not change properly depending on what state they are in.  Some icons
will show their active state/icon when inactive and other icons will show
their inactive state/icon when active.  This is not a problem for the
current icon theme and is understand able as to why it was over looked but
for themes such as mine where all icons change depending on their state.
This not only makes my theme look bad but GIMP as well.

Bug 742300 <https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=742300>: GIMP allows
SVG icons under Linux and Mac but the SVG pixbuf loader is missing from the
Windows version. This is a huge problem as we get more and more high
resolution screens. SVG icons always look good where as bitmap does not.

When I started this project I only had two themes but then I added one more
gradient lighter/darker. At first all my themes had their own copies of the
icons. That would be 350 icons per set or 1400 icons all together. So I
started changeing how my theme worked. I created a Decor folder that held
my icons along with other things. This way both Dark and Darker could link
to the same icon set instead of each having their own. But this seems to be
some what problematic. At times it just did not work for no apparent
reasons.

I think it would be beneficial to separate the icon themes from the
background themes. That way you could change out the background theme but
keep the icons you like, or change out the icons and keep the background
theme.

http://android272.deviantart.com/art/Flat-GIMP-icon-Theme-V-2-1-375010811

--
Jesus is my Lord and Savior. Praise be unto God for giving us a way to live
with him.

<https://www.facebook.com/android272>
<https://plus.google.com/u/0/113439282950133616549/posts>
<http://www.linkedin.com/pub/andrew-pullins/6a/2b3/366>
<https://twitter.com/android272>  <http://android272.deviantart.com/>

---

From: Jehan <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 10 Dec 2015 00:23:40 +0100

Hi,

On 2015-12-09 23:52, Andrew Pullins wrote:
> I have a very successful Icon theme that people seem to like.  My
> theme gives people the options of Darker, Dark, Light, and Lighter
> themes.  Darker and Dark have dark panels but light icons, Light and
> Lighter have light panels but dark icons.  Everything in the theme
> lights up GIMP Orange when selected or hovered over.

We'd be happy to have contributors to the new official theme. This is 
the reason of my opening this thread. :-)

You are welcome to check the master branch and propose some of your 
icons (or newly made) for the missing icons, or even propose different 
icons for the existing symbolic ones if you believe you have a better 
symbol to represent a function. Just make bug reports with your proposed 
icons.

> my theme is GPL V2 but I can change that if need be, my icons are
> licened under the creative commons license: to Share — to copy,
> distribute and transmit the work, to Remix — to adapt the work, to
> make commercial use of the work.

We had a problem (or at least an uncertainty) about the CC by-sa 
license. If I remember correctly, this is because we are embedding icons 
within the main code. Well at least for what we choose to be the default 
icon theme, but since we may want to make the symbolic theme the default 
theme at some point (though I am personally not set on this), we don't 
want to block our future choices.

So that means you'd have to relicense as GPLv3. But since you say that's 
no problem below, well that's good.

See the FSF answer to our question about GPLv3 - CC by-sa compatibility 
here: 
https://mail.gnome.org/archives/gimp-developer-list/2013-October/msg00112.html

> both licenses can be changed if need be.  All I want is for people to
> be able to freely distribute it, make changes, and distribute those
> changes as their own as long as they give others the same rights.
> 
> Bug 724834 [8]: Some icons do not change properly depending on what
> state they are in.  Some icons will show their active state/icon when
> inactive and other icons will show their inactive state/icon when
> active.  This is not a problem for the current icon theme and is
> understand able as to why it was over looked but for themes such as
> mine where all icons change depending on their state.  This not only
> makes my theme look bad but GIMP as well.
> 
> Bug 742300 [9]: GIMP allows SVG icons under Linux and Mac but the SVG
> pixbuf loader is missing from the Windows version. This is a huge
> problem as we get more and more high resolution screens. SVG icons
> always look good where as bitmap does not.

Using SVG icons directl would be very interesting, in my opinion to 
handle dynamically many different kind of screens.

If all platforms are not perfectly handled though, I guess this will 
wait until all main platforms are fully working with vectorial icons.

> When I started this project I only had two themes but then I added one
> more gradient lighter/darker. At first all my themes had their own
> copies of the icons. That would be 350 icons per set or 1400 icons all
> together. So I started changeing how my theme worked. I created a
> Decor folder that held my icons along with other things. This way both
> Dark and Darker could link to the same icon set instead of each having
> their own. But this seems to be some what problematic. At times it
> just did not work for no apparent reasons.

I'm not sure we should have too many themes. A dark and a light seems a 
good deal to me. If people wants more choices, they can always search 
and download (or make their own). The goal is not to suit each and every 
one's need, because it is impossible (there is always someone who is not 
happy with the default). So we should just propose a few sane choices, 
and let people with more specific needs install other themes.

> background themes. That way you could change out the background theme
> but keep the icons you like, or change out the icons and keep the
> background theme.

This is how it works in GIMP 2.9 (and 2.10). Old themes with icons set 
in the gtkrc simply won't work, I believe.

> [10]

Checking the page, it does not seem you are the author of the icons (you 
are citing various people). Are you? If you are not, or not the only 
one, you'd have to ask permission to everyone who participated for the 
license change. You cannot do it on your own (if that is your case).

Jehan

---

From: Andrew Pullins <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 9 Dec 2015 21:53:36 -0500

>
> We'd be happy to have contributors to the new official theme. This is the
> reason of my opening this thread. :-)
>
> You are welcome to check the master branch and propose some of your icons
> (or newly made) for the missing icons, or even propose different icons for
> the existing symbolic ones if you believe you have a better symbol to
> represent a function. Just make bug reports with your proposed icons.
>

I want to be clear I am not trying to force you to use my theme.  I just
wanted to enter the conversation and let you all know people seem to really
like my theme.

We had a problem (or at least an uncertainty) about the CC by-sa license.
> If I remember correctly, this is because we are embedding icons within the
> main code. Well at least for what we choose to be the default icon theme,
> but since we may want to make the symbolic theme the default theme at some
> point (though I am personally not set on this), we don't want to block our
> future choices.
>

I can release the theme in what ever license works best for you all.

Using SVG icons directl would be very interesting, in my opinion to handle
> dynamically many different kind of screens.
>
> If all platforms are not perfectly handled though, I guess this will wait
> until all main platforms are fully working with vectorial icons.

It works very well. but I agree that it has to be for all platforms.

> good deal to me. If people wants more choices, they can always search and
> download (or make their own). The goal is not to suit each and every one's
> need, because it is impossible (there is always someone who is not happy
> with the default). So we should just propose a few sane choices, and let
> people with more specific needs install other themes.
>

I understand that.  I was pointing out that I think it would be better to
separate the icons out.  My themes has 350 icons because a lot of them have
two states. Not everyone likes that, so they will use a theme will 175
icons.  This is a lot of icons to include with each theme. Granted most
people will pick one and stick with that, but if they try out multiple
themes with varying icons/backgrounds the amount of icons can get very high
very quickly. where as if users were able to pick out an icon theme they
like and experiment with the background it could be very cool.

This is how it works in GIMP 2.9 (and 2.10). Old themes with icons set in
> the gtkrc simply won't work, I believe.
>

Oh cool! I have not ran 2.9 in some time.  I know that my theme will have
to have a major over hall on account of moving from GTK2 to GTK3.

> are citing various people). Are you? If you are not, or not the only one,
> you'd have to ask permission to everyone who participated for the license
> change. You cannot do it on your own (if that is your case).

Yes I am the author of all the icons I cited the people who helped me out
with making my theme. When I started I knew nothing about GTK themes when I
started and the people I cited helped me understand how they work, gave me
ideas and all that.  I have permission to license this theme as it is my
theme.  I made the icons and wrote the gtkrc files, these people just
helped me understand them.

---

From: Jehan <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 10 Dec 2015 13:23:31 +0100

Hi,

On 2015-12-10 03:53, Andrew Pullins wrote:
>> We'd be happy to have contributors to the new official theme. This
>> is the reason of my opening this thread. :-)
>> 
>> icons (or newly made) for the missing icons, or even propose
>> different icons for the existing symbolic ones if you believe you
>> have a better symbol to represent a function. Just make bug reports
>> with your proposed icons.
> 
> I want to be clear I am not trying to force you to use my theme.  I
> just wanted to enter the conversation and let you all know people seem
> to really like my theme.

Nobody is forced to do anything. This is Free Software. If you have a 
working theme for GIMP 2.10 that could be a good fit as default theme, 
we'd be happy to get it in. Contributors are always wanted.
Of course we will review propositions and may ask to change things if we 
think some parts are not right for the default theme.

So if you are interested into contributing, I would suggest getting a 
build of GIMP master (not the release which did not have the icon theme 
fix yet) and try to get your theme working there.
In any case, this can't be wasted time. Even if your theme were not the 
default dark theme of GIMP, you'd still need to make it up to date to 
have it working with GIMP 2.9/2.10.

>> This is how it works in GIMP 2.9 (and 2.10). Old themes with icons
>> set in the gtkrc simply won't work, I believe.
> 
> Oh cool! I have not ran 2.9 in some time.  I know that my theme will
> have to have a major over hall on account of moving from GTK2 to GTK3.

GIMP 2.10 is still not using GTK+3.0 yet. This will be for the next 
major release (GIMP 3.0).
Thus I guess GIMP 2.10 themes may not be that far from GIMP 2.8 themes, 
except for the fact that icons are now separate.

Jehan

---

From: Andrew Pullins <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 10 Dec 2015 13:18:59 -0500

> Nobody is forced to do anything. This is Free Software. If you have a
working theme for GIMP 2.10 that could be a good fit as default theme, we'd
be happy to get it in. Contributors are always wanted.

I know, it just seems that every time i go to purpose anying for open
source projects that there is always that one guy that gets definitive and
thinks I am trying to force myself ideas through like its my way or the
highway. Which makes no since when it is a community run open source
project.

> So if you are interested into contributing, I would suggest getting a
build of GIMP master (not the release which did not have the icon theme fix
yet) and try to get your theme working there.
> In any case, this can't be wasted time. Even if your theme were not the
default dark theme of GIMP, you'd still need to make it up to date to have
it working with GIMP 2.9/2.10.

Could you point me to something that would tell me how to get GIMP master
installed?

> GIMP 2.10 is still not using GTK+3.0 yet. This will be for the next major
release (GIMP 3.0).

Oh OK cool.

---

From: Jehan <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 19 Dec 2015 18:48:17 +0100

Hi all,

I have compiled a list of all our missing symbolic icons. It is 
available there:

https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=759673

That's 51 icons (but some are the same at different sizes, so actually 
that's less). Get your name in GIMP credits and submit icons! :-)
Thanks.

Jehan

On 2015-12-09 22:35, Jehan wrote:
> guideline other than the GNOME ones. I could find the origin
> repository there: