the air plasma theme contains lots of svgs. i'd like to edit them. but i have questions

the svgs look all pixeled on their edges. how i have to align stuff in the svg if i want it to perfectly match with the pixels on the screen (so it does not look unfocused)

how does plasma decide where to cut the image (ie what part of it belongs to what corner / side / face etc)

how does plasma align the parts with the logical object (so that the visible edge of the widget appears on the same pixel where the logical edge (in reaction to mouse clicks etc) is)

how does plasma know what parts to stretch and what not

are the names of parts critical

are groups and their structure critical

are there any invisible parts which are required to just be there

why do the air svgs contain so huge amounts of invisible parts

why the air svgs contain pixelled edges and not rely on the svg engine to render smooth round edges correctly (assumiong only the location of straight segments is matched to the pixels so that it will look sharp)

to make it aligned make sure that all the positions and dimensions of the elements are integer numbers (can be seen in the inkscape toolbar)

the names -are- important, to know more about it see
http://techbase.kde.org/Projects/Plasma/Theme

As you are a SVG expert, can you explain as a concrete example to a normal KDE user how to simply make a transparent /usr/share/kde4/apps/desktoptheme/oxygen/opaque/widgets/panel-background.svgz file in less than 1 minute ?


And if you know, can you tell why it has been decided to make it now far more difficult than managing KDE3 taskbar using a simple png file ?

The reason it was changed is because it is not clear which parts of the image file to make transparent and which not to. For many themes changing the transparency globally by a fixed amount would lead to unexpected and very ugly results.