Blurry / Mismatched icons in Quod Libet music player

[stabilergriller]

Hello,

In the plugin section of QL I experience a clash of icons when using elementary-xfce. Curiously, this doesn't happen when using the stock elementary icon theme.

1.Icons for "Telepathy" and "Gajim" are blocky, but they should be sharp

vs.

I found out that the unsharp icon is called "face-smile".

Furthermore, in the emotes/16 folder the icons for the faces appear to be different quality (and also one icon set uses PNG file format, but the other SVG)

vs.

Interestingly, the elementary-xfce version has 4 icons more than the regular one!
I tried to copy the "good" version of face-smile.svg to the elementary-xfce folder, but couldn't get the show the icon in a sharp fashion.

That icon face thing bothers me the most, but there are also a few more inconsistencies:

2. The icon for "Queue only" seems to not fit the rest of the icons (it reminds me more of a KDE / Plasma theme)
   

For reference,
this is how it looks like in the regular elementary theme:

3. Hard to recognize "mute" icon
   

The mute icon does not stand out enough against the white background, especially when highlighted. I think the elementary version does this better:

4. Small nitpick

This is probably just a choice of aesthetic preference, but if possible, I would like to see the icon for "network / server" replaced with the original "elementary" version. Seeing the generic "cloud" icon in this context is kind of odd:

This icon is too used in the plugins sections:

And here the regular (in my opinion better) representation in the original Elementary Theme:

This is just a sample - there are even more differences (for example - "Theme Switcher"). But in general, if prefer the elementary xfce set. It's just that the above mentioned 4 points kinda bother me more or less, so maybe a discussion about them can be had.

[newhoa]

Hey thanks for reporting (and the images)!

The emotes are blurry because Quod Libet is upscaling the 16px icons to 24px (same with your File Manager). This looks sharper in regular elementary because they are SVGs, while in elementary-xfce it is upscaling a PNG which makes it look blurry. Deleting the PNGs and using the SVGs in ~/.local/share/icons/elementary-xfce/emotes/16 (or wherever it is installed on the system, maybe /usr/share/icons) should fix this. After the change you'd have to change the theme to another theme and then back to elementary-xfce again in Appearance Preferences, and probably restart QL -- or log out and back in. I'd really prefer elementary-xfce be an SVG theme, it would fix issues like this and is part of the HiDPI issue (issue #317). I hope it's something that can be done.

Query icon, that is a choice they've made. It looks like they're using view-list or view-list-symbolic, which isn't really used outside of symbolic icons and isn't in the freedesktop.org spec, QL mentions this here. It looks like maybe here is where they define the icon names? So you might be able to change them there (or maybe in the previous link)? Maybe go-next, go-jump, format-indent-more may look better? audio-x-playlist is a mimetype and not an action icon but looks good for queue icon (though maybe they use that somewhere else for playlists). You could always suggest they use different icons to them if you find something that is in the fd.org spec or is widely used and fits better (another for example would be the "Random Album Playback" in your image which might better be media-playlist-shuffle)

Volume icon, this is something elementary just recently changed. They made their "mute" and "disabled" icons use the slash. That's probably a change we can bring over at some point.

Cloud icon, personally I like it better than the network icon (which we still have, named as preferences-system-network) and it matches better with the network folders which use the cloud as well as the upload and download browser icons. That's just my thought though, so more opinions on this would be appreciated. For "Check Updates" QL might would better use software-update-available, software-update-urgent, or system-software-update.

I use Quod Libet sometimes and have had issues with some of the icons. But a lot of them are the icons they've chosen and it would have to be suggested to them to use different ones. I think that needs to be addressed at the program level and not the icon theme level. It's hard to change things for one program because, aside from the fact that that program would still not be good in other icon themes and is more of bandaid, it changes things that are already working well in programs that do use more standard naming. So I think a lot of these things could be addressed by them using more widely used icon names. Although to their credit, the freedesktop spec is pretty short and it's sometimes very hard to find unique icons for specialized purposes a lot of the time.

Anyway, sorry for the huge wall of text. I'd really like for this theme to go SVG, it would fix the blurry issue and is maybe something we can work on (esp since Xfce is now moving to support HiDPI icon themes which require SVG). And the volume icon is something that will probably be brought over in a bit. So hopefully we can address some of the things here while a few of the others might be out of our control.

[dccoder84]

Maybe it helps you modifying the index.theme file under /usr/share/icons/elementary-xfce/ like I did here.