On Wed, 8 May 1996, Mirai wrote:
>
> I think that you'll find that most of these tiny icons
> are drawn by graphic designers pumped up on double-lattes
> and $90/hour salaries.
>
> No amount of blurring can save you against them.
>
> therefore, I humbly recommend against having this feature.
> although it is a nice once, Macs do it too (not just
> win95)....
>
When rescaling down a pixmap by a non-integer number of times several
problems arise. For example, the geometry for the different objects in the
image changes in a differnt way depending of their location. The
inclinated and diagonal lines are distorted, circles and curves look
specially bad. Here helps the aliasing operation. Again, the aliasing
operation is simplified when rescaling an integer number of times (and
preferably a power of 2). A product of the aliasing process is an
increased number of colors of the resulting pixmap, that would use more
entries in the colormap table, so the color usage should be truncated to a
given set of colors.
Win95 uses icons of *fixed* size 32x32, and mini-icons of 16x16. So the
rescale factor for each coordinate is always 2, is equal and symetric for
each pixel, so the resulting pixmap looks better than, for example, when
resizing a pixmap of 64x64 or 34x44 or any other odd geometry down to
14x14 or 16x14. Not to mention that the calculations for the first case
are greatly simplified. Win95 uses also a fixed set of 16 colors for icons
and mini-icons, so the aliasing operation never generates more than these
colors.
The Win95 executable format includes anyway a mini-con resource, so if it
exists will be used (a mini-icon drawn by hand will always look better
than the resized one). Otherwise, as for the old applications, the resized
old icon is used.
In my opinion, a compromise solution for fvwm would be sufficient. For
example, the user could specify explicitly a mini-icon for certain
application windows using the Style command, when the resize operation
generates ugly or unrecognized icons; the same option could use a
UseAppIcon modifier or something like that if the user wants to use the
application builtin icon.
Regards,
Hector Peraza.
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Received on Thu May 09 1996 - 04:11:28 BST