[Development] What to expect from QIcon/the icon engine on screen changes

[Mark De Wit]

Are you using Fusion theme by any chance?   I'm facing the same issue, I even tried writing my own Icon Engine to try and improve matters, but turns out widgets are simply requesting the wrong size icon - nothing the icon engine can do to "second-guess" such requests...

I have filed one such issue here: https://bugreports.qt.io/browse/QTBUG-74100, and in general I feel that Qt's geometry handling in mixed DPI is still rather poor.   I will often have my application start up at ridiculous sizes (3/4 offscreen etc) because it has completely nonsensical geometry coordinates for windows (Qt applying scaling to coordinates when it's not required etc).

Mark

-----Original Message-----
From: Development <development-bounces at qt-project.org> On Behalf Of Elvis Stansvik
Sent: 07 April 2019 19:21
To: Olivier Goffart <olivier at woboq.com>
Cc: development at qt-project.org
Subject: Re: [Development] What to expect from QIcon/the icon engine on screen changes

Den sön 7 apr. 2019 kl 18:45 skrev Olivier Goffart <olivier at woboq.com>:
>
> On 06.04.19 10:40, Elvis Stansvik wrote:
> > Hi all,
> >
> > I'm looking for someone who knows the inner workings of QIcon and 
> > the icon engines.
> >
> > In our application, we almost exclusively use SVG icons, and we use 
> > a single SVG file for each icon (no @2x versions) that we try to 
> > design to work reasonably well at all sizes, since we do not have 
> > the resources to make custom variations for each target size.
> >
> > We put these SVG icons into an XDG icon theme, that we ship inside 
> > the application resources (.qrc) in the expected XDG layout and with 
> > an icon theme index file. We can then use
> > QIcon::fromTheme("our-app-some-icon") to reference an icon (either 
> > through the .ui file or in code).
> >
> > The problem we've run into is that when the application is launched 
> > in a mixed-DPI setup, for example a retina Mac laptop with an 
> > external lower-DPI monitor, the icons appear too large and get 
> > cropped. In effect, it seems to always use the DPI of the primary 
> > screen (the built-in retina screen) when calculating the size of the 
> > pixmaps it generates for the icons.
>
>
> Not sure if this is your problem, but it seems that 
> QSvgIconEngine::virtual_hook does not handle the 
> QIconEngine::ScaledPixmapHook call, which is needed for the QIcon::pixmap(QWindow *window, ...) call.

Thanks Olivier,

I'm not familiar with the code, but it sounds like that could be it.

I'll try to make a minimal test case tomorrow.

Elvis

>
>
>
>
> >
> > To work around this, we've had to put in special code in all of our 
> > widgets that use icons. The code reacts to screen change events (or 
> > changes to the underlying QWindow in some cases), and in that code, 
> > go through each and every one of our icons and do this monkey dance:
> >
> >          auto pixmap = someButton->icon().pixmap(someButton->iconSize());
> >          pixmap.setDevicePixelRatio(window()->windowHandle()->screen()->devicePixelRatio());
> >          someButton->setIcon(QIcon(pixmap));
> >
> > So essentially taking the pixmap out of the icon, set its DPR to 
> > that of the current screen, and then set that pixmap back on the icon.
> >
> > This "works", the icons now look correct on both the retina screen 
> > and the external one, and adjust themselves when the application is 
> > moved back and forth, or when the external monitor is activated/deactivated.
> >
> > But surely this kludge should not be necessary? We've provided Qt 
> > with an SVG, so it should be able to work out on its own that the 
> > screen has changed, and regenerate an appropriate pixmap in response to that?
> >
> > Some more details:
> >
> > - We are running with the Qt::AA_UseHighDpiPixmaps application 
> > attribute turned on. I'm not sure this is relevant for this issue 
> > though, because AFAIK that attribute is only about picking 2x 
> > versions of icons (we have a couple of those, where we have PNGs 
> > with 2x versions).
> >
> > - We are not running with Qt's built-in scaling activated, but 
> > relying on the Mac platform scaling (I'm not even sure Qt's built-in 
> > scaling is applicable on Mac). The application runs with 
> > NSHighResolutionCapable set to True in its Info.plist (which I also 
> > think is the default nowadays).
> >
> > - I have not investigated yet whether this problem also occurs on a 
> > mixed-DPI Linux setup, with Qt's high-dpi scaling activated. Nor 
> > have I checked if it happens on Windows using it's artificial 
> > "screen scaling" (we do not use Qt's built-in scaling on Windows 
> > either, trying to follow the advise in the docs to avoid that for 
> > new applications). So for now this is only about Mac retina + 
> > external monitor.
> >
> > Any advise on this would be highly appreciated, because the code 
> > required to re-trigger pixmap generation on screen changes is a real 
> > kludge all over our code base, and often it happens that we add 
> > buttons et.c. with icons, but forget to update this machinery.
> >
> > I'm not at the office at the moment, but can provide a little test 
> > program that mimics what we're doing on Monday.
> >
> > Thanks in advance,
> > Elvis
> > _______________________________________________
> > Development mailing list
> > Development at qt-project.org
> > https://lists.qt-project.org/listinfo/development
> >
>
> _______________________________________________
> Development mailing list
> Development at qt-project.org
> https://lists.qt-project.org/listinfo/development
_______________________________________________
Development mailing list
Development at qt-project.org
https://lists.qt-project.org/listinfo/development