Some CrystalSVG icons are illegible on dark color schemes.

[poudink]

In light of the creation of the new Plastik Dark color scheme, it may be necessary to create a new "CrystalSVG Dark" icon theme. CrystalSVG has colorful icons, so most of them work perfectly fine on dark color schemes, but a few of them like the 16x16 versions of view-refresh are quite difficult to see on a dark background. It would also be nice to change icons representing windows and widgets like the view- icons to represent the Plastik Dark color scheme instead of the default light Plastik.

This icon theme would have CrystalSVG as a dependency. Since the vast majority of icons would be identical between the two, it makes a lot more sense to only include the change icons and inherit the rest from CrystalSVG.

[poudink]

An alternative course or action would be to simply edit all icons currently in CrystalSVG to be legible on dark backgrounds, at the cost of deviating slightly from the original for all color schemes. That might actually be the best way to go. It could be as simple as adding thin white outlines to certain icons. I'm not necessarily against modifying Crystal or Plastik a little bit as long as it doesn't change the overall style/aesthetic and benefits usability, which this certainly would.

[poudink]

I've decided to go with the first solution after all. I really hope the KDE Store lets you package two icon themes together. Far from a solved issue, but we've got something now at least. This features dark-friendly versions of:
*edit-rename
*view- icons (except 16x16)
some window- icons (except 16x16)
Note that light 16x16 versions of view- and window- icons are included in CrystalSVG Dark right now. This is to remind me to actually make dark 16x16 versions, otherwise they'd just fall back to the 22x22 versions and I'd probably forget.

Bitmaps icons can be a bit of a pain. Scalable icons are really easy though. I'm not sure how big the scope of CrystalSVG dark should be yet. Like, should mimetypes also get dark icons? I'm thinking probably yes, but we'll see. Now that I'm actually making it, it seems CrystalSVG Dark will be a lot more work to complete than I anticipated. I'm no artist, after all.

Note also that I'm not yet going to touch application icons and tray icons, like the KRename icon (which should be identical to edit-rename). This is because the Plasma Style still doesn't support dark color schemes (yes I am still procrastinating on that because it looks like a pain). Once I finally take care of that, some app and tray icons will naturally be modified as well (like KRename).

[poudink]

Hm, actually, scratch that. I won't rule out taking care of them later, but for now I'm going to purely focus on illegible icons like edit-rename, color scheme consistency be damned. I don't want to get side tracked tweaking icons that don't really need it all that much when there are much more important things I could be doing for this theme.