luebking wrote:As suggested it the previous thread, I consider the status quo a problem, yes.

What would be required now, would be an "official" statement of the icon designers on th topic:

@Uri (and everyone else concerned
What's your position in this regard? Do you see (some) icon as "glyphs" which you'd like to meet the related foreground (text) color?

Would you be interested in even more palette invocation, eg. add elements in the (current) highlight or even background (for opaque inverted elements) color?

For me these sort of buttons shouldn't even have icons to begin with. That's one thing I like from Gnome and Windows and it's the first thing I did when I moved to Plasma. Even this forum doesn't put icons on some buttons (Submit, Review and Save) it does put them on reply, tools, quote, delete, etc. Text labels are significant enough, maybe an even better solution is to use different colors on the buttons themselves (again, like the forum does).

Uri_Herrera wrote:For me these sort of buttons shouldn't even have icons to begin with. That's one thing I like from Gnome and Windows and it's the first thing I did when I moved to Plasma.

So do I and I adjusted every gtk+ theme I ever used to skip icons on buttons =)

However, even if this "feature" would be removed altogether, the general problem with monochromatic icons remain:
they can be (close to) invisible, depending on the background.

So the general questions remain as well (you don't get out here so easy

1. Should (some/monochromatic) icons be seen rather as glyphs that should ideally follow the foreground color?
2. Are you in case interested in dynmic color usage even beyond that (such as using the highlight color of the current palette)?

luebking wrote:

Uri_Herrera wrote:For me these sort of buttons shouldn't even have icons to begin with. That's one thing I like from Gnome and Windows and it's the first thing I did when I moved to Plasma.

So do I and I adjusted every gtk+ theme I ever used to skip icons on buttons =)

However, even if this "feature" would be removed altogether, the general problem with monochromatic icons remain:
they can be (close to) invisible, depending on the background.

So the general questions remain as well (you don't get out here so easy

1. Should (some/monochromatic) icons be seen rather as glyphs that should ideally follow the foreground color?
2. Are you in case interested in dynmic color usage even beyond that (such as using the highlight color of the current palette)?

(I don't know) Can't Qt software use a different icon (provided I've added white icons for the dark theme) and just switch between them.

We've been discussing to pitch an API modification (and KIconLoader) modification to even support "randomly colored" icons.
Technically, you'd add an attribute[1] to the svg file that says "replace this color with the current foreground color".
The style (or whatever paints the icon) then asks the icon for a pixmap "for this foreground color" and KIconLoader would ensure to get such colored variant into memory.

This requires some patches, and proposing them to Qt - so we need to know whether this approach is supported by the VDG at all - and to what degree the feature would make sense/be interesting (because digia could be less amused if we ask for QIconEngineV3 two months later

Switching between themes is currently not possible (and would actually be more problematic)

[1] Fear not! If you used the same foreground color for all monochromatic icons, i'm pretty sure we'll have "sed" do that for you

luebking wrote:We've been discussing to pitch an API modification (and KIconLoader) modification to even support "randomly colored" icons.
Technically, you'd add an attribute[1] to the svg file that says "replace this color with the current foreground color".
The style (or whatever paints the icon) then asks the icon for a pixmap "for this foreground color" and KIconLoader would ensure to get such colored variant into memory.

This requires some patches, and proposing them to Qt - so we need to know whether this approach is supported by the VDG at all - and to what degree the feature would make sense/be interesting (because digia could be less amused if we ask for QIconEngineV3 two months later

Switching between themes is currently not possible (and would actually be more problematic)

[1] Fear not! If you used the same foreground color for all monochromatic icons, i'm pretty sure we'll have "sed" do that for you

I would be in favour for such a change. This could be very helpful with the highlighting issues we have in general. That is … if these changes will be applicable not only to buttons.

The change could be invoked from everywhere - whether it is, is another question.
The style (what we've direct control over) would at least apply to Tool- & Pushbuttons, popup menus and tabs - and also *most* (many?) itemviews (lists).

luebking wrote:The change could be invoked from everywhere - whether it is, is another question.
The style (what we've direct control over) would at least apply to Tool- & Pushbuttons, popup menus and tabs - and also *most* (many?) itemviews (lists).

Well, I think that's great then. It will help to polish the overall experience. So I am all in favour of this approach.

Uri_Herrera wrote:For me these sort of buttons shouldn't even have icons to begin with. That's one thing I like from Gnome and Windows and it's the first thing I did when I moved to Plasma. Even this forum doesn't put icons on some buttons (Submit, Review and Save) it does put them on reply, tools, quote, delete, etc. Text labels are significant enough, maybe an even better solution is to use different colors on the buttons themselves (again, like the forum does).

Thanks for the notes! To be clear, two observations:
1. It's hard to expect KDE will ignore other icon themes; people will use them with Breeze widget style, and conversely will use the Breeze icons with some other widget styles. Other mono or mono-like icon themes combined with certain styles would still benefit from the color matching between icons and text.
2. We're talking about many UI elements, not just buttons, give this forum as an example, there are links like "View unanswered posts", etc. at the top that have the icons matching the color of text too. Web pages often quite often use glyphs in such cases (Qt Quick is also compatible with this approach - its style is really generic - http://qt-project.org/doc/qt-5/qml-qtqu ... style.html), Qt's QStyle, as coming from traditional desktop - not so much, and it's at much higher level. Myself I'd like to use the "link" style of buttons effortlessly in Qt Quick and QWidget UIs, being able to emulate the web aesthetics where applicable without having to jump into a browser tech.

jstaniek wrote:

Uri_Herrera wrote:For me these sort of buttons shouldn't even have icons to begin with. That's one thing I like from Gnome and Windows and it's the first thing I did when I moved to Plasma. Even this forum doesn't put icons on some buttons (Submit, Review and Save) it does put them on reply, tools, quote, delete, etc. Text labels are significant enough, maybe an even better solution is to use different colors on the buttons themselves (again, like the forum does).

Thanks for the notes! To be clear, two observations:
1. It's hard to expect KDE will ignore other icon themes; people will use them with Breeze widget style, and conversely will use the Breeze icons with some other widget styles. Other mono or mono-like icon themes combined with certain styles would still benefit from the color matching between icons and text.
2. We're talking about many UI elements, not just buttons, give this forum as an example, there are links like "View unanswered posts", etc. at the top that have the icons matching the color of text too. Web pages often quite often use glyphs in such cases (Qt Quick is also compatible with this approach - its style is really generic - http://qt-project.org/doc/qt-5/qml-qtqu ... style.html), Qt's QStyle, as coming from traditional desktop - not so much, and it's at much higher level. Myself I'd like to use the "link" style of buttons effortlessly in Qt Quick and QWidget UIs, being able to emulate the web aesthetics where applicable without having to jump into a browser tech.

I'm of the idea of no text anywhere but buttons. But since I doubt that will change, sure icons and text labels should match, ideally the icons shouldn't be modified with a stroke, blur, but just the color.