Re: ESC meeting minutes: 2020-09-03

2020-09-04 Thread Jan-Marek Glogowski


Am 04.09.20 um 20:10 schrieb khagaroth> On Thu, Sep 3, 2020 at 11:06 PM
Jan-Marek Glogowski
> mailto:glo...@fbihome.de>> wrote:
> 
>> But coming back to the original bug / suggestion to retire the PNGs: 
>> *the quality of the SVG renderings of the icons at 100% isn't good*.
>> They look "washed out" in comparison with the unscaled, alternative
>> PNG icons
> 
> ^^ That's an understatement. SVG icons are currently absolutely
> atrocious. The first problem is that LO uses odd icon resolution
> (25x25), so the lines are not pixel aligned on export and are
> blurred/aliased.
I did a quick Bugzilla search, which came up with
https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/show_bug.cgi?id=126446, where you
also commented.

At least my impression is, that the people are much more happy with the
scaled SVGs, then with the scaled PNGs in HiDPI setups on Linux and the
result is not "atrocious"; but then I don't use Windows and this is just
my personal impression, having no background in design whatsoever.

So I tested the SVG icons at 100% and the cached PNG version of
breeze_svg/sw/res/emptypage_10x14.svg has the size 11x15 - yikes.

The SVG starts with: https://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/libreoffice


Re: ESC meeting minutes: 2020-09-03

2020-09-04 Thread khagaroth
On Thu, Sep 3, 2020 at 11:06 PM Jan-Marek Glogowski 
wrote:

> But coming back to the original bug / suggestion to retire the PNGs:
> *the quality of the SVG renderings of the icons at 100% isn't good*. They
> look
> "washed out" in comparison with the unscaled, alternative PNG icons
>

 ^^
That's an understatement. SVG icons are currently absolutely atrocious. The
first problem is that LO uses odd icon resolution (25x25), so the lines are
not pixel aligned on export and are blurred/aliased. The second problem is
that with Opengl/Skia enabled, the GPU driver applies some
antialiasing/smoothing on top of that and it ends up looking absolutely
hideous, at least on latest AMD / Intel drivers. No such problems with the
PNG icons or with GDI rendering.
___
LibreOffice mailing list
LibreOffice@lists.freedesktop.org
https://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/libreoffice


Re: ESC meeting minutes: 2020-09-03

2020-09-03 Thread Jan-Marek Glogowski

Am 03.09.20 um 16:53 schrieb Miklos Vajna:
>* Design team discussed two-years plan in weekly meeting: a vision
>  + Retire PNG variants of icons
>+ interested in replacing that with SVG
>+ what is the goal here? (Kendy)
>  + problem on hi-res screens: PNG is blurry (Heiko)
>  + rendering SVG is expensive (Kendy)
>+ if you want to have the same perf as PNG, you’ll need a cache
>+ you need to build that cache on first start
>+ could just generate that at build-time
>+ not exicted to generate them on the user’s machine
>+ Tomaz says: SVG icons already have a cache (Thorsten)
>  + switching to SVG won’t buy us anything, it’ll be still blurry
>+ don’t like the slow cache building at start (Heiko)
>  + just the messenger here…
>+ SVG has to be designed in a way that is cheap to render (Kendy)
>  + done with care, in some optimized way
>  + PNG is just an impl detail; design team does SVG, we use PNG at 
> runtime (Thorsten)
>+ more a dev decision
>+ agreed (Kendy)

The primary bug is
https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/show_bug.cgi?id=115439

I brought this up, because it's a UI problem with many duplicates.
The used icons in the LO UI are always (scaled) PNGs of the original
icons, which can be PNG or SVG, in any non-100% / 96 DPI setting, cached
in the user profile.

The discussion was never about rendering runtime SVG icons. And all the
points mentioned in the notes about caching are already more-or-less
addressed and implemented since quite some time. But currently the user
has to manually select an SVG iconset. Per default the user gets scaled
PNG icons for HiDPI and indeed the result is blurry / blocky.

And - as I understood Tomaz - the complete iOS GUI is rendered via SVGs,
so generally our SVG renderer seems fast and correct enough for simple
stuff, but he also said there are workaround for bugs, if I understood
him correctly.

But coming back to the original bug / suggestion to retire the PNGs: the
quality of the SVG renderings of the icons at 100% isn't good. They look
"washed out" in comparison with the unscaled, alternative PNG icons. I
guess the current PNGs are generated by other renderers already from the
existing SVGs, but I don't know.

In the end people claim this is primary a problem of LO's SVG renderer.

So my suggestion was to create a tender to address the most prominent
SVG rendering problems in LO, so the PNG icons can be dropped in the
optimal case, or the SVG icons can at least become the default. The bug
just suggests to always use SVG versions of an iconset, if you must
scale the icons.

This probably / eventually needs some design people to identify the most
prominent problems they see when working on icons, which would need
fixing. At least it seemed like some actionable work, which could be
done by that team, and also would benefit LO in multiple ways.

Hope this makes my proposal a bit more understandable.

Jan-Marek

P.S. AFAIK the current implementation of the cache isn't aware of the
original icon, so it won't update icons on source changes. And FWIW the
internet has various blog posts about selecting an SVG iconset in LO,
but from my POV this shouldn't be a problem to begin with. Others also
suggested to internally replace SVM with SVG, which is out of scope of
my proposal, but better SVG support would help there too. And there is
even https://github.com/GarkGarcia/icon-pie/issues/14, which suggests to
use an external program to render the scaled SVG PNG icons, which is
just an other workaround.
___
LibreOffice mailing list
LibreOffice@lists.freedesktop.org
https://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/libreoffice