[jsword-devel] Icons and images for BibleDesktop

[DM Smith]

Does anyone have good skills as an artist?

Then your skills are needed!

Most of the images in BibleDesktop are ugly and many are not 
"international" e.g. the icons used to indicate the type of Book.

The current images can be found here:
http://www.crosswire.org/svn/jsword/trunk/bibledesktop/src/main/resources/images

The naming convention is that each image ends in it's size followed by 
the type of image. To make things simple, I'm not naming the size or 
type of image.

For most images we have two sizes, a small one and a large one. 
Currently we don't use the 24x24 ones. The idea was to allow for people 
with difficulty seeing to have larger images.

Some comments on internationalization and accessibility:
It would be great to have images that don't have numbers or letters. 
Then the picture can be used for most languages.
The use of color as a sole distinguishing feature is problematic as some 
people are color blind.
Tooltips can be turned off so they cannot be used for disambiguation.

Here are the ones that I think need work:
These are used in the Passage Sidebar to grow all or selected passage by 
1 and 5 verses respectively.
    Blur1
    Blur5

These are nothing more than a letter in a colored field.
    book-b   -- For "B"ibles
    book-c   -- For "C"ommentaries
    book-d   -- For "D"ictionaries and lexicons
    book-g   -- For "G"eneral books
    book-o   -- For "O"ther books
    book-r   -- For "R"eading Daily Devotionals

The following are used to change the book-* icons:
(Depending on how the book-* icons are done, these may need to be changed.)
    overlay-lock -- For indicating what books require a key to read
    overlay-q      -- For indicating what books are questionable 
theologically
    overlay-x      -- For indicating what books are not supported by 
BibleDesktop

The following is used for the application icon in the task bar on 
Windows and Linux:
    icon16.png

Some more can be found here:
This is the icon used on Windows
http://www.crosswire.org/svn/jsword/trunk/bibledesktop/etc/installer/win32/BibleDesktop.ico

These are the icons used for Java WebStart:
http://www.crosswire.org/svn/jsword/trunk/bibledesktop/etc/jnlp
    icon in 16, 32, 64, and 132 bits and in png and gif format.

This is the icon set used on Mac:
http://www.crosswire.org/svn/jsword/trunk/bibledesktop/etc/installer/macosx/BibleDesktop.app/Contents/Resources/BibleDesktop.icns
The mac icon is essentially just a repackaging of the WebStart icon.

Nearly all of these were done in Xara Extreme and then exported.
Here are the Xara files:
http://www.crosswire.org/svn/jsword/trunk/bibledesktop/etc/images/book-icons.xar
http://www.crosswire.org/svn/jsword/trunk/bibledesktop-web/etc/images/bd-weblogo.xar

The advantage of Xara Extreme is that it is a vector graphics program 
and not a raster graphics program. That means that as the image is 
scaled smaller or larger it keeps its same quality.

Xara Extreme is also free on Linux and at a nominal cost for Windows.
Adobe's Illustrator is another choice but very expensive. But other 
programs can read the format.
On linux there is Inkscape, an SVG editor.

In Him,
    DM Smith