Resolution indpendence

[David De La Harpe Golden]

Steven J Newbury wrote:

> If icon sizes need be that small then, absolutely, a hand-tuned bitmap
> is probably the only way to go.  On a high DPI display such icons are
> larger than 16x16 though.  Scaling down to very low DPI screens may be
> "good enough"

I'd say that would depend on the how "busy" the vector icon is and the
quality of the renderer.  It's certainly _possible_
to design vector icons that look good even drawn at 16x16 (particularly
given both ordered-subpixel rendering/display and sub-pixel positioning
and antialiasing in the renderer).

(also don't forget that the "svg" icon themes tend to bundle prerendered
and potentially hand-tweaked bitmaps for small pixel sizes like 16x16
- of course, unlike fonts, vector icons don't tend to be hinted AFAIK.
Hmm. I guess they could be autohinted to some extent, or, heh, some
color-outline-font format supporting manual hinting used for them :-) )