Looking for mailwatch app

[Grant Edwards]

On 2008-08-30, Brian J. Tarricone <bjt23 at cornell.edu> wrote:
> On Sat, 30 Aug 2008 04:44:50 +0000 (UTC) Grant Edwards wrote:
>
>> On 2008-08-30, Grant Edwards <grante at visi.com> wrote:
>
>> > I've almost got a shell script working that will automate the
>> > process: it scans through all of the "mailwatch*.rc" files and
>> > creates mail/nomail icons annotead with the mailbox names.
>> > Next I need to add a sed command to put the new icon-names
>> > back into the .rc files.
>> 
>> The shell script works nicely, but the result is pretty much a
>> failure.  Each icon contains the mailbox name and is 120 pixels
>> wide and 24 pixels tall.
>> 
>> There are two problems:
>> 
>>  1) Apparently a mailwatch "spot" in a panel has to be square?
>>     Somebody is adding a large amount empty space above and
>>     below each of the icons (regardless of whether the panel is
>>     horizontal or vertical).
>
> Yeah, I guess there's no real reason for this.  It should just scale
> the icon to the height of the panel (or width, for people with vertical
> panels), and maintain the aspect ratio.

Is the squareness restriction for the button imposed by the
mailwatcher or the panel infrastructure?

>>  2) I can't figure out how to stop the .png icons from being
>>     scaled (they don't look as good scaled).  I made them a
>>     particular size because that's the size I wanted them. I
>>     suppose I could ditch ImageMagick as my icon generator and
>>     find some way to generate an SVG icon with a command in a
>>     shellscript.
>> 
>> The scaling thing is just an annoyance.  I can probably find a
>> panel size such that the icons are scaled 1:1.  The square
>> thing is sort of a showstopper.  It's just not usable if you
>> have to have a 120x120 button if you want label text that's 100
>> pixels wide and 18 pixels tall. :/
>
> The problem is that getting icons the right size in the panel is a bit
> harder than it should be, esp when the icon is inside a container (a
> button, in this case).  The amount of padding between the image and the
> edge of the panel is dependent on the gtk theme, among other things.
> The panel will force plugins to be no larger than the size of the
> panel, so if you calculate the icon size incorrectly in the plugin, you
> get a chopped icon.  I don't quite remember, but I think the sizing in
> the current release that you have is pretty awful -- it actually scales
> the icon much smaller than it needs to be.  I've already fixed that,
> but, as I've noted, it's been a very long time since the last release.

If I were generating SVG instead of a pixmap, the scaling
wouldn't matter.  As it is now, one can just play with the size
of the panel until it looks nice.

-- 
Grant