Rethink images organization

[cycomachead]

I'm making some notes while reviewing images translated to Spanish. I don't have clear answers, but we should at least try to categorize the types of images used in the repo. This isn't exhaustive, but here's what I can think of:

Things Without Code

• supporting icons: the globe, little images of anchors (snap run links)
• general curriculum icons: sharing, paired programming, etc. (These first two are pretty similar?)
• examples: stage output, art, sprites, etc
• IDE pics (menus, annotations, etc). Some of these have more text than others.

Things With Code:

• pure snap! blocks, just a script
• script pics that show a speech bubble
• script pics in a running state

We have problems with all of these, and I think they are each different.

Right now, we are experiencing three kinds of problems:

• translation of text
• low resolution images
• keeping up with Snap! updates.

The third we haven't discussed recently - and for the most part we've been able to avoid it. But there are lots of signs all over the curriculum of old Snap! pics. (Both in the IDE, and blocks which have subtlety different labels and inputs.)

Possible Ideas:

• Most icons don't have text, we should move to new formats like font awesome and SVGs. But some static images will always exist.
• Icons with text should be SVGs, which would actually expose the text in reasonable ways. (We would likely still need to keep two versions, as multi language SVGs are sadly not supported.)
• Script pics, and pics with code in theory can be regenerated with a script. But we need to control the export state.
• Script pics while a script is running may not be able to be regenerated so easily, but there's few of these.
• Some of these images, like math blocks don't actually need to be translated all of time. Does it matter?

It seems like we need to expose this status in a programatic way. Does this mean using file/folder names?

@ddgarcia @maryfries

[brianharvey]

We still have bunches of old-style List input slots (which I still like better...) in pictures. Every so often we redo one.

On 8/16/22 11:49 PM, Michael Ball wrote:

I'm making some notes while reviewing images translated to Spanish. I don't have clear answers, but we should at least try to categorize the types of images used in the repo. This isn't exhaustive, but here's what I can think of:

Things Without Code

• supporting icons: the globe, little images of anchors (snap run links)
• general curriculum icons: sharing, paired programming, etc. (These first two are pretty similar?)
• examples: stage output, art, sprites, etc
• IDE pics (menus, annotations, etc). Some of these have more text than others.

Things With Code:

• pure snap! blocks, just a script
• script pics that show a speech bubble
• script pics in a running state

We have problems with all of these, and I think they are each different.

Right now, we are experiencing three kinds of problems:

• translation of text
• low resolution images
• keeping up with Snap! updates.

The third we haven't discussed recently - and for the most part we've been able to avoid it. But there are lots of signs all over the curriculum of old Snap! pics. (Both in the IDE, and blocks which have subtlety different labels and inputs.)

Possible Ideas:

• Most icons don't have text, we should move to new formats like font awesome and SVGs. But some static images will always exist.
• Icons with text should be SVGs, which would actually expose the text in reasonable ways. (We would likely still need to keep two versions, as multi language SVGs are sadly not supported.)
• Script pics, and pics with code in theory can be regenerated with a script. But we need to control the export state.
• Script pics while a script is running may not be able to be regenerated so easily, but there's few of these.
• Some of these images, like math blocks don't actually need to be translated all of time. Does it matter?

It seems like we need to expose this status in a programatic way. Does this mean using file/folder names?

@ddgarcia @maryfries