[LV2] [LAD] Feature request: icons

[Hanspeter Portner]

On 18.03.21 11:29, Thomas Brand wrote:
> On 2021-03-18 09:36, Alexandros Theodotou wrote:
>> On Mon, 2021-03-15 at 18:06 -0400, David Robillard wrote:
>>>
>>> Personally I'd just avoid 99% of those nightmares and ignore the
>>> concept of system icon "names" and bitmap sizes entirely and just
>>> stick
>>> an SVG in the bundle and point some property at it.  That's trivially
>>> easy and works just like everything else in LV2 does.  There's
>>> nothing
>>> magic about files in bundles, no paths to configure, etc.
>>>
>>> ...
>>>
>>> I suppose, as a middle ground, we could punt in much the same way
>>> that
>>> we do with lv2:binary: you can specify a whole bunch of them if you
>>> want.  Sorting out which one to use is the host's problem, solved by
>>> looking at the files themselves.  Thus conveniently avoiding the need
>>> to write a vocabulary for information that's already there anyway.

I like that. Loading icons (or just icon image headers) ist fast and can be done
on-the-fly.

>> I think you're right about keeping it simple with a single property
>> that points to an icon file (lv2:icon?). Even if we go with that I
>> guess additional sizes could be provided by adding a suffix to the icon
>> filename or something, like filename.svg.32x32. Sounds simple and
>> flexible enough to me.

The size is in the image data, no need to duplicate the information. For vector
graphics it makes no sense in the first place, imho.

> Would handling Icons via output port be totally insane?

yes ;-)

For dynamic graphics output there already is the inline display feature which
does something similar.

> The icon would be fully contained in the plugin. Whether or not restrictions on
> must/should/do not use of image formats is a question, it could be as simple as
> an rgba block of pixel data. Whether or not the data is dynamically created (eg.
> drawn to match a size) or from static resource would be left open.
> Greetings
> Thomas

Hosts will want to show icons in plugin lists, so the icon should go into the
metadata manifest without any need to instantiate/run the plugin.

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