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Re: Module icons

 

Hi Seth,

I know what you mean. Our icons are not really designed for high DPI, the truly correct solution is to have a whole set of more detailed icons that don't look as chunky when rendered out at 52x52px.

The next best IMO is to render the (vector) icons at double resolution, so they stay aligned, just a bit chunky and under-detailed wrt the physical pixels.

The lowest level is what we do right now, which is render at 1x and then blow them up to 2x (we use bilinear interpolation). This looks pretty bad, especially when there are high frequencies in the image data. Blurry lines upscale a bit better than sharp ones, which is probably what you are seeing. But that's pretty much as good as it gets using 26px raster source data. 

I'm unsure if we can feed our SVG files into WX directly, which would get us scalable icons for free, and avoids the fiddly render-to-png step (though we can still embed the binary data if wanted). Failing that, rendering all icons twice, once at 26 and once at 52, is possible, but takes quite a bit more building (doubles the icon count).

The absolute best is to have a set of more detailed icons (52px with 1px lines) which look perfect on Retina. But that needs rather more artistic talent than I have to get the best results.

Cheers,

John

On 19 March 2019 20:23:03 GMT, Seth Hillbrand <seth@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>OT: I'm reminded of watching a Yankees game the first time they 
>broadcast in high definition and feeling really bad for Joe Torre's 
>dermatologist.  That is to say I second Jeff's take; some things look 
>better blurry.
>
>That said, if you pixel align these icons, we can require pixel 
>alignment for any future, v6 icons.  The next design round can size the
>
>graphical elements for alignment.
>
>-S
>
>Am 2019-03-19 16:14, schrieb Jeff Young:
>> The blurry ones actually look better on a Retina display, but I’m OK
>> with the others if they look better everywhere else.
>> 
>> Cheers,
>> Jeff.
>> 
>> 
>>> On 19 Mar 2019, at 19:54, Wayne Stambaugh <stambaughw@xxxxxxxxx> 
>>> wrote:
>>> 
>>> Whew!  I was starting worry about my vision there for minute :)
>>> 
>>> On 3/19/2019 3:52 PM, John Beard wrote:
>>>> D'oh, yes! Sorry, new ones on the right, I changed it and didn't
>>>> change the text.
>>>> 
>>>> Cheers,
>>>> 
>>>> John
>>>> 
>>>> On Tue, Mar 19, 2019 at 7:50 PM Wayne Stambaugh 
>>>> <stambaughw@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>>>>> 
>>>>> Hey John,
>>>>> 
>>>>> Are you sure the new icons aren't on the right?  The ones on the 
>>>>> left
>>>>> look blurry to me.  Either may eyes are totally gone or the icons
>on 
>>>>> the
>>>>> right are the aligned ones.
>>>>> 
>>>>> Cheers,
>>>>> 
>>>>> Wayne
>>>>> 
>>>>> On 3/19/2019 3:43 PM, John Beard wrote:
>>>>>> Hi,
>>>>>> 
>>>>>> I plan to pixel align the module icons in Pcbnew, as they are
>>>>>> currently blurry (and not even consistently blurry) - they're 
>>>>>> probably
>>>>>> the worst offenders left for blurriness. Getting these aligned at
>
>>>>>> 26px
>>>>>> will be a good step towards hiDPI-aware scalable icons, as they 
>>>>>> will
>>>>>> also be aligned at 2x resolution.
>>>>>> 
>>>>>> However, due to a quirk of the number 26, it's impossible to have
>
>>>>>> the
>>>>>> current fat-ish pins, keep the pins and module centred in the
>icon,
>>>>>> and have 3 pins to a side, and keep them all pixel aligned (which
>
>>>>>> is
>>>>>> why even the most-sharp current icon has blurry middle pins). So 
>>>>>> the
>>>>>> pins are now a bit skinnier. Hence a quick check that these icons
>
>>>>>> are
>>>>>> acceptable.
>>>>>> 
>>>>>> Comparison image attached (new icons on left). I haven't changed 
>>>>>> any
>>>>>> metaphors or the pin colours.
>>>>>> 
>>>>>> Cheers,
>>>>>> 
>>>>>> John
>
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