Community feedback: Custom icons for external applications

[halirutan]

As you all know, we use one-colored, flat Material Design Icons in JabRef. They look great and there is only one little drawback: For some specific things they are not available. Especially, the "push to external application" button does not fit well into the overall appearance

I spend some time to create the missing icons in the Material Design look. However, icons like the one of TeXStudio which is colored and has much detail, cannot be converted one-to-one to the same style. The goal should be that the application icons can be recognized as good as possible by the users of JabRef. I have created icons for TeXStudio, TeXMaker, Vim, OpenOffice, Emacs, Lyx, and WinEdt:

and they would like this in the (new JavaFX) toolbar

I spend quite some time especially with the TeXStudio and TeXMaker icons but there were many issues. The famous TEX letters are too thin a looked awful as an icon. The details of the lamp were impossible to recognize, let alone the light-beam that appears in the original icon. Incidentally, the TeXStudio guys are currently settling for a new icon that actually can easily be converted but until then, we need a solution.

I'm looking for some kind of feedback and suggestions for improvement.

[tobiasdiez]

You should also cross-post it to our forum as there are more active users than here. However, I really like your icons so we can just directly include them in my opinion.

[AEgit]

First of a warning: I haven't used any of the icons in the JabRef panel to call these external programs and I probably won't do that, as I have a different workflow. So take my opinion with a pinch of salt.

Having said that, I've worked with pretty much all of the applications represented by the icons and I think they can easily be recognised from the proposed icons. Overall, I think the icons look really good!

[halirutan]

@tobiasdiez @AEgit Thank you both for your replies. The current version of the icons is already included in the consistent-fxcolors branch.

@AEgit If you happen to have too much time, you could take a look at the general redesign. The snapshot can be downloaded here. This branch based on the new maintable-beta which unfortunately is still not completely functional.

[stefan-kolb]

I think you did a great work here 👍
Like you said it's quite hard when the icons become really small.
Why don't you use the official OO logo?

The emacs logo could be inverted like this too. Or did you try and and it didn't look good?

[halirutan]

@stefan-kolb Actually, I probably spend too much time on such details than I'd like to admit. But you are right, the official logo works as well. I already had it and I also have the Emacs icon in that style. Before I wanted to switch it, I had already tried so many version that I wanted to ask the community first.

My reasoning was as follows: The current toolbar with all icons (some of which I have swapped for better ones) looks like this

We have a mixture of two types of icons. The ones on the left are (now) completely filled. I wanted to use only filled versions for better consistency, but for the love of god, there was no filled version of Copy and Paste. I tried the other way around and changed all to outlined version, bu not all were available as well and the outlined version of the trash bin didn't look so good.

That's when I decided to ask before I keep on working on this. In conclusion, you are right. I will use the filled versions of Emacs and OO.

Btw, I have never seen a more unbalanced icon than the one of Vim. How anyone could ever think that making the diagonal line of the V and the italics "im" so different looks good is a mystery to me.

[halirutan]

Small update. Fixed Open-office and Emacs. Created a filled version of copy and paste. Made WinEdt slightly thicker and I added an alternative version for Vim that follows the original by including the background-rectangle. First the toolbar in comparison old vs. new

Here are all icons in a larger resolution

[stefan-kolb]

The new OO and Emacs logos look great 😄
Also great work on the WinEdt, much better recognizable now!

For the case of Vim I would suggest to just use the V as it is the main element of the logo and just skip the im. The V is not so well recognizable in front of the rectangle but it would still be ok.

I would rather keep the current copy & paste icons, looks fine to me. Also you lost a bit of size with the new icons.

[halirutan]

I would rather keep the current copy & paste icons, looks fine to me. Also you lost a bit of size with the new icons.

I lost it on purpose because the original ones were too large. I consider asking another question on the Mat. Des. Ico. repo because the template contains a bounding box. The small round thing on the top of the Paste icon and the background paper in the Copy icon extend into this bounding box area. That makes copy, paste, and the scissors larger than others. I'm not sure when this is allowed but I guess that these icons are very old and standardized for a long time and can break the rules.

[stefan-kolb]

Hm maybe they are larger because they look smaller otherwise, due to less filled areas? Put differently:
Actually, when I look at your icons, I think they are smaller now than the other icons. But if you say they are exactly inside the bounding box as the others that's an optical illusion 😄

[AEgit]

@halirutan : I had a go with:
JabRef 4.2-dev--snapshot--2018-03-23--consistent-fxcolors--36303bc4b
Windows 10 10.0 amd64
Java 1.8.0_161

I will only comment on the appearance as other issues I ran into (e.g., poor performance, search function not displaying results, etc.) are probably related to the maintable-branch and are therefore not of concern here.

I think the new icons look really nice and overall JabRef has a modern very user-friendly look! Good job!
There are two things I noticed - but they might be also related to the maintable branch, so please forgive if this is not the right place to mention them.

1. Entries that I had marked in JabRef 3.8.2 with different colours are no longer marked (or at least no colours are shown). The groups panel contains a "Markings" group, but this seems to group items according to different users that had marked some items in the past.
2. Nested groups take too much space in the groups panel. If you have a deep group structure, some of the subgroups will not be shown in the groups panel unless you give much more space to the whole groups panel (which is not feasible). Otherwise you literally see just a white area instead of the subgroups name. I guess if you have a multi-monitor setup with JabRef running in fullscreen on a separate monitor you will not notice this. But already if you just use half of the screen on a 24'' monitor and a resolution of 1920*1080 you end up with the issue I just described.