On Mon, 10 Feb 2014, Hélio Guilherme wrote:

I have completed the SVG conversion. I have also tested the use of SVG, in
the attached files, only changed gui2/toolbar.c. Missing changes in
gui2/session.c, gui2/gretl.c and gui2/gpt_dialog.c.

Sorry it has taken me so long to respond on this. I can only plead that my time has been very much taken up with work on parallelization in gretl; this has been slow going but we should have some interesting results to share soon.

Anyway, on the SVG icons. First, thanks very much for your work on this. This should stand us in good stead if and when we get serious about supporting gretl on tablets.

I say "if we get serious about tablets" because our current method of drawing the relevant icons from inline pixmaps is more efficient so long as we don't want/need to support resizing. And the icons as they are sized currently are part of the GUI design. I can see a need for resizing only in the case of a display which is physically small but of high resolution (thus, a tablet or similar touch-oriented device), making the icons too small to be "tapped".

We could, of course, switch from pixmaps to SVG in all uses, but that would require that we add a dependency on librsvg (so we'd have to build librsvg for Windows and OS X and include it in the packages we make available). And really for no gain in functionality, on the desktops or laptops on which we expect to see gretl running.

Besides, if we're thinking about platforms where the 16x16 pixmaps for icons on the toolbars of various gretl windows are too small to work properly, I believe that a more thorough re-design would be needed. Consider, for example, the script editor toolbar, which has 19 little icons in a row. If we made them 24x24 (assuming that would be big enough to solve the "tap-ability" problem) they would be in danger of overflowing the toolbar.

Yes, presumably we would want scalable icons, but only in conjunction with a re-think of the interface. And right now I'm not (yet) thinking that supporting tablets is a priority. Maybe that will come.

Allin

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