larsmaxfield
commented
5 months ago Once potential solution I am looking into is using SVG vectors.
GitHub user yjg30737 has already made pyqt-svg-button, a "PyQt button which supports svg icon[s]".
And Siemens has a nice collection of MIT-licensed SVG icons called Industrial Sharp UI Icons.
I want to investigate how to achieve consistent and beautiful button icons instead of using Unicode character symbols for the Viewer's grid of buttons on the bottom-right of the interface.
The interface buttons on the bottom-right of the Viewer use Unicode character symbols for their icons. I chose this because it was easy (I didn't have to figure out how to add image-based icons to buttons) and it seemed to keep things lightweight for the Viewer (I didn't have to keep a folder of icons in the source code, in the executable, in the installer, etc.).
There are a couple problems with using symbol-based icons for these buttons:
Symbols are not always consistent between computers. The symbols are pulled from the typeface (font) of the operating system, which means what I see on my Windows 10 machine is often different than what someone sees on their Windows 11 machine.
Symbols might not exist on computers. The symbols I originally used were from Unicode blocks which Windows 10 supports, but which macOS does not, resulting in missing icons with little squares in their place when run on macOS. I have since changed these symbols to those included in both Windows and macOS (#21).
(The symbols I use) are ugly. And especially since switching them to ones supported by both Windows and macOS, they don't communicate function as well as I originally wanted.
I want to solve these problems — namely, to have consistent and beautiful button icons.