This might have been covered elsewhere, did a quick search but didn’t find anything. I find that the icons look substantially worse in Rhino 8 (on Windows) in several ways, especially with display scaling above 100%. These images are captured on a 1920 x 1080 resolution laptop screen. At all scaling levels the new icons appear really stark, with too much contrast and overly fat strokes. And at +100% scaling the new icons appear blurry and larger (especially 125%):
Which is my daily driver setup. This honestly looks terrible and unacceptable. And yes, the dots and chunky window separators waste pixels/space and look inelegant.
Yes, there’s an open issue for this already, especially for high DPI displays.
Rhino 7 used pixels for toolbar icons; Rhino 8 uses SVG files. The conversion between SVG and pixels is different - some call it smoother, others blurrier. I don’t think we’ll ever have 100% equality between the two, unless you set your toolbar buttons to 36 pixels in both Rhino 7 and 8, and run on a non-High DPI display.
It turns out that designing arbitrarily scalable images that look good at a number of sizes is not only difficult, it’s impossible. Consider a vertical line that is 2 pixels wide when rendered in a 36 pixel icon. That same line, when rendered to a 40 pixel image becomes 2.22 pixels wide, which is necessarily blurry.
Ah I see, that’s unfortunate. I wonder if anyone prefers these “smoother” icons. Anywho, I just tried fiddling with the new toolbar button size feature (again at 140% display scaling on a 3840 x 2160 resolution screen), and I’m not seeing the icons actually scale at anything under the default 24. They simply move closer together and never become as small as the default in Rhino 7:
Ah I see, thanks for the clarification. Just tried all increments from 16-24 and unfortunately they all look blurry/bad on my system (140% display scaling at 3840 x 2160)
I think we need machine learning now, so vector icons that supposedly were going to be infinitely scalable can actually be infinitely scalable with AI algorithms and all that crazy new magic
Exactly!
I tried SVG over and over and finally gave up.
For icon drawing I still use a vector software (Xara), but make pixel-perfect individual icons for i.e. 20 and 32px.
It’s not too much effort.
I don’t think it makes much sense to adjust the icon size to 33 or 37px.
16, 20, 32, 40 and 64px is enough choice IMO.
I don’t actually agree with that. At 140% everything looks fine and sharp in all the software I’m using on this system (Gimp, InkScape, TeXstudio, Sublime Text, Acrobat), except the Rhino 8 icons! But even if using a custom scaling factor was worse, the icons still look blurry and worse with the standard Windows scaling factors (125% and 150%). Especially at 125%, which would be my choice if pressed:
I assume that the purpose of using SVG files is that they will look shaper/better than bitmaps at different scales and resolutions. If so, I think it’s hard to argue that these new icons aren’t a regression.
I looked again and found your 150 percent scaling the best on both my low dpi screen (1920 x 1200) as well as on higher dpi laptop (2560 x 1600) as well as on a macbook, which makes me think judging the images by screenshots is tricky. That being said, can you send a screenshot where you have both Rhino and other programs in view at the preferred scaling you want to use, to see if I can see what you are experiencing?
150% scaling is definitely the least blurry, but that’s just too big for me. Here’s a screenshot of multiple programs running at the standard 125% scaling on a 3840 x 2160 resolution screen:
I can see better now what you mean. What strikes me is that it’s not just the icons, but text items are affected as well.<-- Edit: this might be caused by different contrast
I’m not sure what can be done but added RH-74408 UI is blurry at 125% scaling
Edit: The 140% scaling is very clear (added to the YT)
@AndersDeleuran I’ve tested this a bit more myself, and added some more info to the YT item. My suspicion is the icons are converted to pixels before they get scaled.
Thanks so much for looking further into this. It might be useful to look at how the Grasshopper2 icons are rendered, which look sharp and delightful at 140% scaling:
@AndersDeleuran the next public build should look better at 125%, 150%, and 175%. The 140% will still look blurry as we need to make further changes to account for percentages that don’t result in a whole number when multiplying the percentage by the standard toolbar image size (24).
I asked about this in the thread below. I’ve updated to through to the latest WIP release and there is no difference. The blurry icons actually look worse in real life than my posted image. I’ve stopped using the WIP because my eyes can’t take it.