zim-wiki team mailing list archive

[Jaap Karssenberg <jaap.karssenberg@xxxxxxxxx>]

On Mon, Feb 25, 2013 at 5:21 PM, Tim <cyboreal@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> Would anyone else benefit from having some means of displaying an icon
> before a page title in the Index tree? I would love to have some means
> of visually representing the pages in a very large notebook, to rapidly
> identify the page for which I am looking. I imagine this could be
> accomplished simply by having a "favicon.png" or "favicon.ico" in the
> directory for a given page and instruct Zim to load it if such a file
> exists. There could also be a default icon for pages with no icon
> specified. Anyone else see this as a feature worth implementing?

There have been several requests for icons for pages before, but so
far I avoided looking into it as I don't see much use for it myself.
But feel free to have a look at it and commit a patch.

I think it is useful to talk a bit in terms of use cases: what do you
want to use it for?

A) When you talk about favicon I assume you want to mark "special"
pages in the index, e.g home page. So each icon will only appear only
once. This is very doable, you need to add the logic to determine the
icons, add them in the index and then just pack the icon in the
treeview cells.

B) Other users may want to use icons more like tags. So multiple pages
about the same topic can have the same icon. Here I see more problems,
because you potentially want multiple icons per page. Also when they
act as tags, you may want to search for them etc. In fact in this case
I would propose adding a tag to a page and let the tag have an icon
instead of adding an icon directly. If this is what you are thinking
of, it will need more design work to come up with a good patch.

Regards,

Jaap


P.S. I think I will veto calling the icon "favicon" by default,
instead configure an icon name per page without the need for the icon
to have a special name. Supporting the name "favicon" as a special
name can be considered though if you really are doing website
development in zim.