(Public service announcement: I’ve always hated themes and still wish they’d mostly just go away so we could all just concentrate on building and using the same sexy pixel-perfect GNOME look-and-feel. GNOME branding wins, performance wins, some people complain but don’t they always, yadda yadda. Now, with that out of the way…)
I was having a look at this OpenSolaris bug report yesterday. Basic problem: icons from the OpenSolaris Nimbus theme are showing up in some places larger than they ought to. Apparent cause is that the icon theme doesn’t provide those particular icons in a small enough size, and the larger versions aren’t being scaled down as required. The vinagre toolbar is the example given in the bug report, but I’ve seen it other places too (e.g. in the Glade toolbar editor).
Having a look at the index.theme file for Nimbus, I saw that all the icon folders were marked as “Type=Fixed”, and assumed that was the problem. However, I spent a couple of hours trying every combination of “Type=Scalable”, “Type=Threshold” and Threshold=[some-big-number]”, and “MinSize=[some-small-number]” that I could think of, and nothing changed. (I regenerated the icon cache after each change, and also tried without any icon cache at all.)
Just what should an index.theme file look like to ensure that (say) the 48×48 icons will always be scaled down to (say) 24×24 when required? Nimbus also has its own engine, could a bug there cause this problem? Or a bug in the gtk+ widgets/applications where we’re seeing the issue?
EDIT: Further to Matthias’ comment, Type=Scalable is working fine now. Not sure what I was doing wron yesterday…