[OSM-talk] OSM icons (was: "Crudely-drawn pint glasses")

[Ulf Lamping]

Igor Brejc schrieb:
> Is there somewhere a repository of totally free general-purpose icons 
> such as this? I'm asking because I would like to extend Kosmos rendering 
> rules with some nice icons.
>   
The collection of OSM icons in SVN [0] is quite usable and should 
contain most of what you need.

There are currently 6 icon themes:
- square big: 32*32, png, color framed depending on group
- square small: 16*16, png, color framed depending on group
- classic big: 32*32, png
- classic small: 16*16, png, used by JOSM (some have white background to 
prevent "black icon on black ground" problem in JOSM)
- svg: scalable, svg
- japan: scalable, svg, symbolic representation and "limited in number"

You can have an overview (with license information) at [1]. The last few 
weekends I was working to change all icons to be PD - but there's still 
lot's of work left to be done here. I'm using openclipart stuff and 
drawing new icons where missing (using inkscape to get SVG and then 
convert and scale to the different png formats).

My main interest is having a complete set of icons for JOSM (ex mappaint 
plugin). You can find the current matching of OSM features to the icons 
at the JOSM elemstyles[2] file. Would be nice if Kosmos would use the 
same icons for the same things as JOSM does.

The icon directory structure is hierarchical, first dir the icon theme 
and then sorted by topic (different sorting compared to OSM, as the 
icons originate from gpsdrive). Selecting a theme and keeping the themes 
icon directory structure will make it easy to switch between icon 
themes, and will make it easier for you to do future updates. For 
example, JOSM elemstyles file just keeps the relative path of the icon 
to the "themes root dir".

[0] http://trac.openstreetmap.org/browser/applications/share/map-icons
[1] http://www.gpsdrive.de/development/map-icons/overview_lic.en.shtml
[2] 
http://josm.openstreetmap.de/browser/trunk/styles/standard/elemstyles.xml
> I agree with you about the pint glass. But I guess any contribution has 
> to be appreciated if nothing better comes along :)
>   
Yes, that's my model as well - for me it's better to have a medium 
quality icon than none at all. I already know some icons that I would 
like to improve, but the time is the limit.


I guess the icon quality will improve over time, if more applications 
use these icons and more users and developers get interested in having 
better icons ...

Regards, ULFL

P.S: I still consider Kosmos to be closed source, so be careful to 
include any none PD icons into Kosmos!
P.P.S.: A gifted icon designer with some Inkscape knowledge would still 
be more than welcome ...