Tray Icon Size (Cropping vs. Scaling)

[Biju Chacko]

milosz derezynski wrote:
> Hey all,
> 
> Now there is another thing, with the BMPx "systray" icon, i'd roughly 
> desribe it like this:
> 
> BMPx sets ICCCM tray icons with a size of 128x128. The only "panels" 
> that provide "systrays" i've tested this with so far were KDE kicker 
> systray and gnome-panel notification area.
> 
> Now gnome-panel seems to scale the icons upwards if the provided icon is 
> big enough to be scaled (say, panel size is changed to 48 height, and 
> provided icon is 128x128, it will scale it, well, down, rather, not up, 
> to 48x48), it will scale it. It will, however, not scale _up_ icons, 
> e.g. GAIM, which provides i think either 24x24 or 32x32, no matter how 
> big you make the panel, it will alway stay this size.
> 
> KDE kicker systray again always keeps the tray applet arranged in a way 
> so that the systray icons are always at 24x24 (or 32x32, don't know 
> which size, but same size as the GAIM icon), but it also scales the BMPx 
> icon down from 128x128 to whatever size the others are so it appears 
> correct.
> 
> XFCE-Panel however crops the icon; i haven't seen that yet, but one of 
> our users reported this, so i'm not sure if it crops in center or from 
> 0,0 coordinates, but in any case it does not scale it down, and the 
> behaviour of the tray seems to be like KDE's ("no matter how big the 
> panel, systray area stays at the same size").
> 
> Now the question is, is there any spec on how ICCCM-notification area 
> implementing applets/panels should handle the icons, or is that totally 
> up to the implementor; or in  other words, _must_ i supply a 24x24 (or 
> 32x32) icon, or is it in theory ok to supply bigger icons and scaling in 
> XFCE-panel-tray-applet is just NYI.
> 
> Please refer to official specs only with this, i've searched all on fd.o 
> and couldn't find anything, but i don't want this to be an opinion thing 
> :D Thanks.

I'm no expert in these matters, but:


From

http://standards.freedesktop.org/systemtray-spec/systemtray-spec-0.2.html

"Tray icons may be assigned any size by the system tray, and should do 
their best to cope with any size effectively."

hope this helps,

-- b