Icon Themes in 2.7

[vkbo]

The last couple of days I've been working on generating the icon themes from large icon repositories rather than using the limited pool of icons provided by Typicons. This resulted in me having to manually design a lot of icons myself to supplement the icon set.

Instead, from 2.7, icons will be pulled from Google, and a few other sources. Currently, I've added 9 themes to the main branch. The chosen icons can still be tweaked, so if anyone feel like testing it out, you can do so from the repo main branch.

I'm thinking specifically of @HeyMyian who participated in the issues thread at #2159, which resulted in a few new settings in Preferences.

The new icon themes have their colours set by the selected GUI theme, which means they will always match the theme. I've also added a dropdown box for selecting colour overrides for the icons in the project tree. Having a lot of colours there can look quite busy. It is possible to select between "Theme Colours", "No Colours" and a set of theme-specific colours where all icons will be the same colour. It would be nice to get some user feedback on this feature too.

This is the default theme:

The new settings are at the top of the page in Preferences:

[HeyMyian]

Oooh let me tell you, I was sceptical at first because change is scary but I really like how this option turned out! ✨

I had a look around the new icon files:

# This file is automatically generated. Do not edit.

I can't read so this sign didn't stop me. I'm guessing if one knows their way around SVG, this file is very editable? I played around with it a bit, and it looks like by specifying a fill color on the various shapes makes multicolored icons possible. I'm very happy it's still an option.

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I find the "active/inactive" icons draw too much attention to themselves. Especially the orange "neutral" icon next to folders, which cannot be toggled, is too prominent for that it basically conveys no information about the item's active/inactive status. These could maybe look better in a grey color to calm down the visual impression.

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I'm having a problem with the association of colors between the application theme and editor theme, and the color hierarchy within the application theme itself.

• I can sort of kind of understand why both folders and project notes are yellow in the default theme, but realistically, they have very different functions and so should not be related by color.
• Worse, root folders and documents of the 3rd level headline (scenes) are both colored blue.
• When using for example both default dark themes for application and editor, all headlines in the editor share the green color with documents of the 1st level (title and parts).

I have no solution to this, because colors are not endless and application/editor themes are independent from each other. My best idea is to change the root folder and folder icons to a neutral color in the default color scheme (white? - same color as a document without headline).

In the same vein, I'd favor the default setting for the icons to be "No Colour". From the eyes of a new novelWriter user, they may be flummoxed why their documents are the same color as folders (blue and yellow), active (green) or inactive (red). That colors mean headlines might not be so intuitive.

[vkbo]

All themes have a faded colour for text as well. I realised I can use this one as an icon colour as well. The non-checkable icon for active/inactive uses that here, and I also allowed it to be applied to icons for the very toned down look!

[HeyMyian]

That message is not for the user, but for developers who want to alter the content of the files directly. Such changes will be lost on next update because they are generated from scripts that pull content directly from the icon theme repos.

I see the icon_themes.py file but I'm a bit ignorant how it works. Does it take the .json as input and output the .icon file? Which directory would custom-made themes go, and in which format?

The folders can be switched to orange. I'm not sure what would be a good default for root. I tried Aqua as well, but I generally hate that colour. 😄

I'm in favor of the orange folders. You're right in that aqua would be terrible for the root folders 😄

Hmm, what about best of both worlds? A switch to apply the colour override only to roots and folders? The document colours also affect the colour bars in the Novel View, since they follow the same rules.

I somehow didn't expect the bars in the Novel View to be affected by the color/no color settings. I understand that in the Tree View, documents can have all sorts of headlines and so the coloring can at least in some ways be arbitrary - so it makes sense to offer a monotone option. But in the Novel View, we see every headline laid out hierarchically. This is expressed by the indent and the color. Removing the colors here makes the bar icon irrelevant.
I'd prefer them to keep the colors, but in the end it's a very minor point.

I noticed that the Outline View does not update the setting by itself. I need to select something from the novel dropdown for the bars to update.

[vkbo]

I see the icon_themes.py file but I'm a bit ignorant how it works. Does it take the .json as input and output the .icon file? Which directory would custom-made themes go, and in which format?

It's called from pkgutils.py. For instance, running ./pkgutils.py icons /tmp remix should regenerate the remix icons. The first argument is any folder to check out the icon repository, and the second argument is one of "material", "remix", "fa" or "all" for each theme, or all of them.

Custom themes are not available right now. I didn't port that over when I rewrote the icon themes. I can add it back. It's just an additional lookup path. But the theme file format is a bit tricky to generate manually, because there are additional requirements for the structure of the SVG XML too. So I haven't decided if I want to allow custom icon themes. The icon colours can be overridden by custom GUI themes instead, so they can still be modified.

I'm in favor of the orange folders. You're right in that aqua would be terrible for the root folders 😄

With the switch that limits the override to roots and folders, you can set them to "orange" if you want to. So I think I will leave the theme colours as-is. You can in any case create a custom theme that sets whatever colours you want.

The reason I reused colours for folders and roots was to limit the noise in the project tree. I thought four colours looked less busy.

I somehow didn't expect the bars in the Novel View to be affected by the color/no color settings. I understand that in the Tree View, documents can have all sorts of headlines and so the coloring can at least in some ways be arbitrary - so it makes sense to offer a monotone option. But in the Novel View, we see every headline laid out hierarchically. This is expressed by the indent and the color. Removing the colors here makes the bar icon irrelevant. I'd prefer them to keep the colors, but in the end it's a very minor point.

The primary indicator for the Novel View and Outline View is indentation. The colours were ever only there for decoration. They use the same settings as for the Project Tree, because it would make no sense to use different colours for the same information in different views. When overriding the colours, the override is on the theme level, not in the Project Tree.

Since I added the override switch, you can chose to keep these colours for heading levels and notes, so I see no issue with it. I suspect most people won't touch any of these additional settings.

I noticed that the Outline View does not update the setting by itself. I need to select something from the novel dropdown for the bars to update.

Hmm, I'll look into it. Probably just need to call the refresh. You can also just press the refresh button manually.

[xahodo]

Perhaps purple could be used for the root folder and then a darker purple for regular folders? This would be more consistent imo, as both are folders.

[vkbo]

With the latest changes, you can now override the colours only on the roots and folders in Preferences if you wish, so I think there are enough customisation options already in place.

The default root and folder colours are defined by the GUI themes. It's possible to submit new themes with different colour combinations. I just picked existing colours for the themes contributed by others, but I'm happy to take suggestions for changes as well as new GUI themes.