Failure IS an option for hackweek . While things looked fairly optimistic on the icon theme/font front, the actual results don’t look so good.

While the chopping script is working fairly well, it’s hardly elegant and really suffers from insanely slow startup time of Inkscape. The “crop” is done thanks to Inkscape’s verbs and requires Inkscape to be called once per icon. Even worse, to clean it up and remove some cruft for the Fontforge import, it needs to be called once again.

Ted mentioned a GSoC project to provide a better interface for external scripting (using dbus), but I haven’t had time to look into it yet. By the time I’ll look at this again, it’s going to be merged in, surely .

Fontforge’ interface couldn’t be in a bigger contrast in terms of speed. Importing SVGs as glyphs and generating a truetype font out of the template is faster than you can release the return key. Sadly FontForge doesn’t expect the font height to be 24pt and all the circles don’t end up as such after the import. I haven’t been able to figure out how to either scale the SVGs up to 1000px in Inkscape or transform after the import in FontForge.

So this has been a rather kind failure. One that doesn’t leave me feeling like I wasted my time.

CSS theme engine

I had an old mockup for a CSS theme that now felt too bubble gummy. After dealing with the hyper-realistic renderings of gnome-icon-theme high res, I enjoy the minimalism of Moblin.

Sadly time has run out as I’ve had some outstanding tasks I needed to handle. Hopefully I can get back to this. The engine just manages to avoid me.

One of the greatest things about openSUSE is happening again this week. Hackweek time seems to also be the only time I have something worthwhile to put on my blog.

I don’t have a very focused plan for this year, but I’d like to investigate the following:

• Stencil icon workflow.

  I’d like to have a single SVG canvas with all my icons and generate an SVG-only icon theme. Ted Gould showed me his nifty script at GCDS that used Inkscape‘s verbs to ‘chop up’ an SVG into individual SVG files, so that part I already know is feasible.

  The untouched ground is importing those SVGs into a FontForge project file to generate a font out of the theme as well.

• CSS gtk+ theme. Robert Staudinger has been working on a gtk+ theme engine that allows a theme creator to use CSS-like language to draw stuff (as opposed to talking to a developer to draw stuff). The project has been on my radar forever and I’ve never really sat down and gotten my hands dirty. Must fix!

Wish me luck!