Mike
McBride
Jost
Schenck
Kevin
Breit
2002-02-12
3.00.00
KDE
KControl
icon

# Icons

## Introduction

&kde; comes with a full set of icons in several sizes. These icons are being used all over &kde;: desktop, panel, the &konqueror; file manager, in every toolbar of every &kde; application, etc. The icons control module offers you very flexible ways of customizing the way &kde; handles icons. You can:

- choose different icon sizes

- assign effects to icons (for example make them semi-transparent or colorize them)

- configure these settings for each of the different places icons will be used in: for example the desktop, toolbars &etc;

Please note that some of these settings may depend on your selected icon theme. &kde; comes with one icon themes by default, high color. There is also a low color theme in the kdeartwork package, along with others.

## Theme

Starting at the top, you can see some example icons. These change in appearance depending on the icon theme you select. Most default installations will have only one icon theme available, the &kde; default High color theme. There are others contained separately in the kdeartwork package, and you can download more from the internet.

Use the Install New Theme to browse to the location of newly downloaded and unpacked themes, and they will then become available to select from above.

## Advanced

Looking at this second page of the icons control module, you will see two areas:

- An area labelled Use of Icon. Here you can choose which particular usage of icons you want to configure, for example Toolbar.

- An area at the top where you can see how icons of the selected kind will look like using the current settings. Note that the state of this preview also depends on the icon state selected in the Effects tab (don't worry about that now, we'll explain that below).

When you want to configure icons, first select the usage of icons you want to configure. Change the settings until you like the preview. You can then choose a different icon usage and configure that. At the end, if you are satisfied with your settings, click OK or Apply to take the changes in effect.

There are two further options to consider, Size and Effects.

### Icon Size

You have two options relating to icon sizes. First, you can choose of a list of icon sizes. Second, you can tell &kde; to draw all pixels using double sized pixels. The largest icon sizes are especially useful for visually impaired people.

Which sizes will be offered by the icon size listbox depends on the icon theme you have selected in the icon themes control module. For example, the low color icon theme only offers the sizes 16 and 32 for desktop icons and 16, 22 and 32 for toolbar icons. The high color theme offers icon sizes 16, 32 and 48 as well as sizes from 64 to 128. However, as &kde; can not have all these icon sizes in store, icons using size 64 to 128 will be automatically generated which may result in a loss of quality.

If the icon sizes offered by your chosen icon theme are not enough for you, there's still the option Double sized pixels. If this option is selected, all icons will have double sized pixels, &ie; a 2x2 block instead of normal pixels. While this makes it possible to achieve very large icon sizes, the quality is poor: icons will look blocky, an effect you may remember if you've grown up using a Sinclair ZX Spectrum or similar. If this is an option for you, using the large sizes offerd by &kde;'s high color icon theme will always result in a much better quality than using the low color icon theme with double sized pixels.

You can also choose to have smoothed icons, an effect similar to anti-aliasing of fonts. Enable the checkbox Blend alpha channel to see this in action, but note that it will slow down graphics on a slower computer.

### Effects

Finally you can configure certain filters to be applied on every icon. Actually, you can configure these filters not just for every kind of icon usage, but for every one of three states an icon can be in:

Default

  This is how the icon will look normally

Active:

  This is how the icon will look when the mouse cursor is over the icon

Disabled:

  This is how the icon will look if its corresponding action is disabled, i.e clicking on it will not lead to any result

Select one of these states to configure a corresponding icon effect. Please note that this configuration will only affect icons of the currently selected Use of Icon category(see above): configuring an effect for active icons, while Toolbar icon usage is selected, will not affect active icons used in other places.

Below the list of icon states there are two options: you can configure an effect and you can select the semi-transparent option, which will make the background shine through the icon. To the right of the effects list box there's a setup button to pass additional parameters to a filter.

The following effects can be applied to icons:

No Effect:

  Icons will be used without applying any effect

To Gray:

  This filter will apply a grayish look to the icon. Click Setup... to configure the intensity of this filter. Note that it is customary for most user interfaces to use this effect for disabled icons only.

Colorize:

  Icons will be colorized using a custom color. For example you may configure active icons (&ie; the icon the mouse cursor is over) to shine golden. Click Setup... to configure the used color and the intensity of the colorization.

Gamma:

  A different gamma value will be applied to all icons. If you're no photographer and don't know what Gamma is: it's quite similar to what people call contrast. Just play around with the gamma settings by clicking on Setup... to get a feeling for this effect.

Desaturate:

  Icons will be drawn desaturated. This is quite similar to the Color setting on your television. Click Setup... to configure the amount of desaturation.

## Section Author

This section written by: Jost Schenck jost@schenck.de