Toolbar Icon Size on 4K Monitor

Bob James

Many thanks to the three of you for taking the time to reply

It seems somewhat incredible that given the vast amount of plugins/extensions .jpg toolbar icons being used by every SU user that SU would be modified to only use svg icons.
How in the world did this get past beta testing????

Dave R

SVG icons were chosen specifically because they can be scaled to compensate for high res screens. Open a PNG icon in your image editor and scale it up so you can see it. The quality will be crap. SVG just makes sense.

Pixero

Could we make a community effort to update all these icons to SVG if the authors don’t do it?

Dave R

That sounds like a good idea. I would suggest offering the same icon packages to the authors so they can include them in updates of their extensions.

slbaumgartner

@pixero said:

Does anyone know if there is something special that needs to be done in the scripts code to use SVG icons or can we just put SVG icons in the plugins directory?

The icon files are given explicitly by the plugin code, which has to choose between the old png for SketchUp versions prior to 2016, and between svg and pdf for Windows vs Mac. It doesn't take a lot of code, but has to be changed, and no, simply dropping a svg file into the folder won't do the trick.

fredo6

...in addition to the relevant comment by slbaumgartner, I would add that there is no automated way to generate a nice SVG from a PNG. Basically, the icon has be redrawn in SVG (via Inskape or similar drawing software).

Fredo

Bob James

@dave r said:

SVG icons were chosen specifically because they can be scaled to compensate for high res screens. Open a PNG icon in your image editor and scale it up so you can see it. The quality will be crap. SVG just makes sense.

Thank you, Dave.
Yes, it does make good sense, but only if there is an easy path for changing all of the hundreds of current plugin/extension icons. This is based on the assumption that as time goes on more and more people will upgrade to 4k. But, apparently, the consensus is that 4k will remain a niche.

Pixero

Could someone post a code snippet that shows how to implement svg or pdf icons so I could start updating my own plugins at least.

slbaumgartner

Here's an example from one of my extensions:


if(not file_loaded?(__FILE__))
  cmd = UI;;Command.new("RakeAndSplay") {Sketchup.active_model.select_tool(SLBPlugins;;RakeAndSplayTool.get_tool)}
  cmd.menu_text = "Rake and Splay"
  if(Sketchup.version.to_i >= 16)
    if(RUBY_PLATFORM =~ /darwin/)
      cmd.small_icon = Sketchup.find_support_file("rake_and_splay.pdf", "Plugins/SB_rake_and_splay")
      cmd.large_icon = Sketchup.find_support_file("rake_and_splay.pdf", "Plugins/SB_rake_and_splay")
    else
      cmd.small_icon = Sketchup.find_support_file("rake_and_splay.svg", "Plugins/SB_rake_and_splay")
      cmd.large_icon = Sketchup.find_support_file("rake_and_splay.svg", "Plugins/SB_rake_and_splay")
    end
  else
    cmd.small_icon = Sketchup.find_support_file("rake_and_splay_16.png", "Plugins/SB_rake_and_splay")
    cmd.large_icon = Sketchup.find_support_file("rake_and_splay_24.png", "Plugins/SB_rake_and_splay")
  end
  tb = UI;;Toolbar.new("Rake and Splay").add_item(cmd)
  tb.restore if tb.get_last_state == 1
  UI.menu("Tools").add_item cmd
end
file_loaded(__FILE__)

Pixero

Thanks.

Bob James

Thank you, slbaumgartner
Would you tell me how to use this for each plugin extension?

Bob James

@slbaumgartner said:

simply dropping a svg file into the folder won't do the trick

He's right!
I converted and replaced the icons in SketchUcation to .svg at 300pixelsx300pixels at 300dpi but there was no change in SU2018

icons 300-1.png

slbaumgartner

@bob james said:

Thank you, slbaumgartner
Would you tell me how to use this for each plugin extension?

If you're not familiar with Ruby API programming for SketchUp, you might be in over your head as the code needs to be adapted to each specific extension, there is no universal drop-in-place form.

You need to create the appropriate icon files (svg, pdf, and png) for the extension and put them in the extension's folder. Then you need to find where in the extension's code it creates and populates its toolbar and integrate my snippet with whatever the original code does there, which will almost surely vary from case to case.

fredo6

For inof, all my plugins can support PNG, SVG and PDF (as everything is managed by LibFredo6).

I am just missing the icons in SVG / PDF

That's just a matter to put the SVG / PDF file in:

subfolder IMAGES_Standards of the plugin folder (say Fredo6_FredoScale/IMAGES_standard)
respecting convention: same name as PNG but removing the trailing _24 (or _16 or _32). So FSC_icon_Scale_24.png would become FSC_icon_Scale.svg

Fredo

Pixero

Question. Does the svg/PDF icons need to be made in a special size? (I know they are scaleable just wondering if the dokument size should be anything special.)

slbaumgartner

@pixero said:

Question. Does the svg/PDF icons need to be made in a special size? (I know they are scaleable just wondering if the dokument size should be anything special.)

You can draw the icon artwork at whatever size you wish. The view of the contents will be scaled to fit the available space in the toolbar button, so the physical size you drew is irrelevant. But you do need to verify that you haven't put details into the artwork that won't be visible when scaled to a typical toolbar button on a particular size display. Since you probably don't have a lot of different displays available to test, the best practice is to keep your icons fairly simple.

One precaution though: Whatever size you draw, you should keep the drawing canvas square. Otherwise SketchUp will scale it based on the larger dimension and it won't fill the full button in the other direction.

Bob James

@unknownuser said:

For inof, all my plugins can support PNG, SVG and PDF (as everything is managed by LibFredo6).

Awesome!!

@slbaumgartner said:

You can draw the icon artwork at whatever size you wish. The view of the contents will be scaled to fit the available space in the toolbar button, so the physical size you drew is irrelevant. But you do need to verify that you haven't put details into the artwork that won't be visible

Do I have to re-draw them? Can't I just continue converting them from jpg/png to svg?

slbaumgartner

You can convert png or jpg to svg or pdf, but since the content is a raster image it most likely won't look good when scaled. The contents need to be vector to scale cleanly.

Paul Russam

PNG and JPG are raster images whilst SVG is a vector, Whilst you can save a raster image as an SVG its a complete waste of time as it will remain a raster image but it'll be encoded in XML and be substantially larger (file size) than the original.
To create proper SVG's you need a vector app such as Adobe Illustrator, Affinity Designer etc. Photoshop (raster app) will NOT create proper SVG's
SVG's are size independent, they will look no better or worse if you create them on a 10000x10000px canvas or a 100x100 one and dpi is irrelevant outside of the paper print industry for any image be it JPG, PNG or especially SVG.

I've attached a zip file containing 2 SVG's, one is a logo I did recently (lei-logo-pt1-colour.svg) in Affinity Designer. If you look at it in a text editor you'll see its just a simple set of instructions in XML defining an elements shape/fill/border etc.
The other is an SVG I hand wrote for fun (SolarSys-V4.svg), as it's handwritten it's far clearer to see the XML structure ... and it's animated

TL;DR
Don't convert PNG/JPG to SVG, make them from scratch.

sample svgs.zip

derei

Inkscape has a feature to vectorize a bitmap (Trace Bitmap) and it can be used to quickly convert some icons, provided you have a decent quality of the raster image.
You can try with small icons, but I doubt there will be enough resolution in them to get a decent result. See attached.
However, with a decent quality image, the results can be impressive.