Glyph font as icon support?

Windows 11 use glyph fonts as icons in many places. These fonts including Segoe Fluent Icons, Segoe MDL2 Assets and SettingsIcons,.etc. It will be great if DP can support it when pick up icon for button. Is it possible in near future release?

It's probably a good idea, but only once more people are using Windows 11 and after Microsoft have shown they aren't going to abandon the idea and leave it in a broken state after 6 months like so many other new features they've added in the last 10 years. :slight_smile:

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Just like MacOS use SF Symbols everywhere. Glyph fonts are vector based and should be easy to support light and dark mode. Just a thought.

By the way, how about svg support for icon?

SVG is difficult as there aren't really any good libraries for rasterising it, at least last time I looked.

There also aren't many good tools for making vector icons in general. Maybe Illustrator is the only good one but it's outside most people's budget. Unless things have improved a lot in the last few years, the other vector tools I tried were really unsuited to making lots of small icons, IMO.

We actually considered switching to vector icons entirely with Opus 12, but after some investigation of the tools and libraries, as well as the issues with the formats themselves, we went with multiple bitmap sizes (and optional scaling on top of those if there isn't a bitmap size for the target DPI; it's actually up to each icon set how that works, so artists can specify what is scaled when).

I'm not actually convinced that vector icons are that good an idea:

  • At small resolutions, you need so much hinting in the vector data to make the vectors hit the right pixels and not create a complete mess, as well as to turn on/off alternate versions of things to suit the smaller size and lack of resolution.

    It's as much effort as simply generating the normal bitmaps (maybe still from vector sources, but not packaged as vectors for the end user) for each desired size.

  • At large icon resolutions (e.g. 128x128 and above), downscaling a larger (e.g. 256x256 or 512x512) bitmap works very well with no real need for vectors.

They seem like a good idea in theory, but don't actually solve a real problem, IMO.

Support for icon sets delivered as glyph fonts is still a good idea, just to give people a wider library of icons to work with (and ones where someone presumably has gone to all the effort at hinting the icons for low resolutions, the same as professional font designers do for on-screen fonts). But only if Microsoft stick with it and don't abandon it and break it like so many other things. :slight_smile:

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How is it different from just selecting a character-glyph as text for button instead of selecting an image?

Labels and icons get put in different places on toolbar buttons.