Re: [Libreoffice] Auto-detection of toolbar icon size (well, kinda)

Hi Peter,

On Thu, 2010-11-25 at 11:47 +0100, Peter Lairo wrote:
> That's fine, but the large Icons are (about 50%) *too* large. I'm on 
> Windows 7, have a 19" monitor, ratio: 4:5, resolution: 1280x1024 and I 
> cannot fit the icons I want into the Toolbar.

        From your screenshot: you are using Beta2 (or Kendy didn't fix the
fallback to Industrial) - one or the other; can you try again with
Beta3 ?

> The situation is made worse by the very poor quality of the icon images. 
> For instance:

        This should be rather better in Beta3, particularly wrt. consistent
sizing and colouring; there are also some rather nasty bugs in B2, now
fixed in B3 :-)

> 1. The "New document" icon looks more like a fireplace than the standard 
> (a blank white rectangle).

        And that is odd.

> 5. There is no "Page Settings " icon.

        Odd; it is unclear to me how we can not have an icon that is included
in the base icon set: that sounds like deep brokenness; we should fall
back to the original icons - Kendy - again ? or is this not a regression
- perhaps there never was an icon for that ?

> 7. The "Review Changes" Toolbar icons don't have icons (only text).

        So - any artist that wants to jump on that is much appreciated.

> 9. The *Bold* /Italics/ and _Underline_ icons should be the letters *B* 
> /I/ and _U_ (and localized where possible). Using only "A"s is much less 
> recognizable. Even users in non-localized countries will recognize the B 
> I U better than A A A, even if they don't know what the letters stand 
> for. Even Windows Live Writer uses B I U. Using only A A A shows a lack 
> of understanding of basic usability principles. (This is also a pet 
> peeve of mine with the current crop of Thunderbird developers.)

        So - provide the (consistent) artwork, and we'll ship it; what I
suggest is that we leave A,A,A as the fallback for all locales, and add
locale specific versions for en_US etc. [ the code is there for this, we
just need the artwork lovingly creating ] - go for it.

> Icons need to be *quickly* recognized. That should be the #1 priority. 
> *Every* other factor (e.g. aesthetics) is a *distant* second to 
> recognizability.

        Of course; no one is suggesting otherwise.

        However, tiny icons are -far- harder to make distinct, and recognisable
[ 'printer settings' in 16x16 pixels eg. ;-], and the fact that your
(rather customised) toolbar does not fit on the screen - does not really
affect the decision to change the defaults IMHO.

        If you want to add lots of new icons, and toolbars, then you can also
set the size to small manually :-) I think the main concern is to make
sure the defaults are visible, clear and usable for beginners.

        Having said that - the best way to improve the icons, is to work on
them yourself - or find someone that can for you.

        Thanks,

                Michael.

-- 
 michael.meeks@novell.com  <><, Pseudo Engineer, itinerant idiot