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