Re: [Usability] Icons for document systems

[Rodney Dawes <dobey novell com>]

On Mon, 2006-04-03 at 15:40 -0700, Bill Wohler wrote:
> Given a hypertext document reader such as Info, what icons would you
> suggest for going back and forth in the history, going to the next and
> previous chapter, going up a section, or going up all the way to the
> table of contents?

Info is beyond a hypertext reader. It's quite different from Firefox,
for example. I would suggest using the same bits that Yelp does, which
is what should be displaying info under GNOME anyway. And, if emacs is
running under GNOME, it would be sweet if it opened the help in Yelp,
rather than the internal info viewer, actually.

> Name-wise, it seems the logical choices would be stock_left,
> stock_right, stock_previous, stock_next, stock_up, and stock_top
> respectively. However, the next and previous icons (from GTK and GNOME
> if you turn the green to blue) have a different metaphor from the
> arrows and look strange:

Ignore stock_* in terms of navigational arrows. As I said before, the
ones in GTK+ are the canonical things to use at the moment. Several
icons in gnome-icon-theme are duplicated and with names they shouldn't
be using, due to common mishap, or due to some random application
wanting to name them that way. The stock_{next,previous} icons, though,
I believe, are meant for next/previous mail, and are used in Evolution
in that manner.

> It seems the next and previous icons should have the same metaphor as
> the up and top icons. I checked the HIG (great document, by the way)
> but didn't see anything this specific. Since this couldn't possibly be
> a problem with the icon set, I suspect that I'm barking up the wrong
> tree.

The metaphors aren't wrong. There are just too damn many icons. That
will soon be solved though. *evil laugh and finger tapping*

-- dobey