help with anti-aliasing on icons

[Chuck McKnight]

I am currently working on a new icon set for Rockbox. I am making the icons originally as SVGs using Inkscape, then scaling them down to icon size. The problem I am having, however, is getting the edges anti-aliased correctly. Anyone know a good technique to get all the edges a neutral color?

(BTW, I am trying to avoid anti-aliasing to a specific color, because I want the same icon set to be usable with any backdrop)

[hhannah]

I'm not an expert, but try placing the icons on the neutral colour background (red 255 green 0 blue 255) BEFORE reducing them - if you didn't do that already -  that might work, or at least "less cleaning" should be needed

Edit: I tried what I suggested and it doesn't completely work... the post below is right...

[Chronon]

Chuck, what do you mean by anti-alias to a neutral color?  The color (255, 0, 255) is interpreted as transparent.  However, you can't really anti-alias to it because colors that are close, but not identical to it will show up as magenta.  Transparency is fully on or off: There's no implementation of alpha channels in Rockbox currently.

The best you can do is to pick a background color and design your icons for use with that.

[Chuck McKnight]

Hmm, well I'll fool around with it a bit more and see what I can get. I started trying to anti-alias against a solid gray background, and that seems to be working better anyway.

BTW, has there been any talk of future use of alpha channels in Rockbox?


Edit: I asked on the Inkscape forums, and someone there recommended using GIMP to threshold the Alpha, and that worked perfectly!  8-) So case closed, I guess.

*Just a reminder to modify your post instead of posting a new one if no one has replied.

*Sorry, I visit multiple forums, all with different posting regulations, so I confuse them at times. Post fixed now.  

[Chronon]

Nice.  That info might be handy on the CustomIcons page, or maybe a tutorial page linked from there.

*Just a reminder to modify your post instead of posting a new one if no one has replied.

[crzyboyster]

And would you like to post those icons in the icons gallery?

> http://www.rockbox.org/twiki/bin/view/Main/IconSets

Make sure that it's licensed, though!

[Chuck McKnight]

They're not done yet. I've only got a few actually finished at the moment, but yes, I plan on posting them there when I finish.

How does one go about licensing such things though?

[Chronon]

You just have to post them with a notice about what license you have chosen to release them under.  Often an archive will contain a LICENSE or COPYING file that contains the terms of the license.  It seems that a few themes are getting released under a Creative Commons license.  

Basically, you are the creator of the content so you hold copyright and you get to decide what license you want to release your work under.  Being that Rockbox is released under GPL, I think it's appropriate if the license you choose allows users to distribute and modify the work.  Some things don't get released with a specific license and it makes it problematic for the content to be used/re-used as an official Rockbox resource.