KDE 4.0: icons go crazy.

Kevin Kofler kevin.kofler at chello.at
Sun Jun 15 23:06:29 UTC 2008


Andrea <mariofutire <at> googlemail.com> writes:
> Let me get it right.
> Some of the themes I find in the System Settings of KDE 4 are known not to
> work with KDE 4?

CrystalSVG will probably not work for KDE 4 as long as we don't find a way to 
make it work for both KDE 3 and 4. Right now there's no version which fully 
works with KDE 4 anyway. The other icon themes in kdeartwork are being migrated 
to the new naming scheme, but the renaming isn't complete yet, so they don't 
work with KDE 4 yet. Most third-party KDE icon themes are also for KDE 3 only.

> Why are they there?

Because there's no way to programmatically figure out what desktops the icon 
theme was designed for. That's why we have the icon-naming-spec now. Some 
history: there was at first a specification for how to name icon themes and how 
to structure the directories. Both KDE and GNOME followed that specification, 
however the problem was that the actual icon names were not standardized. So 
you could in principle select a KDE theme in GNOME and the opposite, but it 
wouldn't actually work properly. Current versions of GNOME and now also KDE 4 
use a new standardized naming (icon-naming-spec). However, the specification 
for how to structure the themes is still the same, so we can't programmatically 
distinguish between the old and new themes.

An additional problem is that KDE 4 is the first desktop to implement the 
fallback mechanism in the icon-naming-spec, where the first alternative for an 
icon named foo-bar.png (before looking in other themes for the icon) is foo.png 
in the default icon theme. This is why KDE 4 handles nonstandard themes 
particularly badly (you'll get unfitting generic icons), older desktops just 
falled back to the default theme in such cases (KDE 4 can do that too, but only 
if there isn't a more generic icon in the theme you selected, and unfortunately 
the old KDE 3 icon names are usually just one word, so they often get 
accidentally picked up as fallbacks, e.g. edit.png gets used for any missing 
edit-*.png).

> How do I know which ones are good?

You have to read the documentation for the icon theme to see what it supports. 
There are few themes which support KDE 3, KDE 4 and GNOME at once, one such 
theme is the Bluecurve theme (bluecurve-icon-theme), though it doesn't include 
22×22 icons, only 24×24, so the icon rendering in KDE 4 is suboptimal. You may 
have some success with icon-naming-spec-compliant icon themes designed 
originally for GNOME.

        Kevin Kofler




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