Re: High-res Customize icons

[Stefan Monnier <monnier@iro.umontreal.ca>]

>> I don't know of any no good widely supported vector graphics format
>> that's not terribly complex.
> Why should we care how complex is the format.

We don't.  But the complexity is often linked to the presence of
practical problems (e.g. lack of a good Free implementation, or lack of
a good multi-OS implementation, security bugs, performance cost, ...).

> I understand that it's tempting to use fonts because of simplicity,
> but we should resist that temptation, IMO.  The alternative is not too
> hard to use, and it's the right way of doing this stuff.

Other than the problems already mentioned with our SVG support, there's
also the fact that we don't have any way currently to auto-scale an
image according to the current face nor do we support using different
sizes for the same image displayed simultaneously in different frames.

So for "little images" in the modelines or in "list buffers" (like
dired), using special characters instead of actual images makes a lot of
sense (I suspect that it can be also significantly more efficient both
in memory and CPU use, but I don't actually know it to be the case).


        Stefan