When I work with Gramps 5.1.6 in Linux Mint 21.2 or LMDE 6, the status column in the Database Manager window doesn’t show the open folder icon for the active database:
The icon is visible in LMDE 5.
Can I cure this by changing themes, or adding another character set? I see similar things in other applications, like FreeFileSync.
I know that has been discussed before, but a search here only gave results for Windows.
Which font is used for the Status? The 2 glyphs I see in that column are the:
lock
but it appears to be pulling the lock from an image, not a Unicode character:
and the Open folder
But looking at the dbman.py for a list of Status icons also shows a dialog-error and document-open icon. There do not seem to be corresponding .svg files. Maybe someone can help point us at where to look?
I know where they are, and they DO exist in LMDE 6, and probably in Mint 21.2 too.
I know that, because I found a Python program that shows a few hundred standard icons, and lists which ones can’t be found. And that proves that the dialog-error and document-open icons exist in the current theme.
I found this program on StackExchange, in tthe 2nd answer of this thread:
This loads icons from the current theme, and shows error messages for missing icons. And where Gramps apparently fails to load the ‘document-open’ icon, this program shows that it’s there.
The difference between that and Gramps is that it’s loaded in a different manner, which does not depend on the current font, as set in the OS, or changed by the Theme add-on. And because it doesn’t depend on the font, it always shows if the icons are there.
Loading icons via their name, via the font, is a route that works in LMDE 5, but it seems to depend on the availablity of the proper range in that font, which is in that 1Fxxx range, meaning that it’s not available in any 16 bit font. And I also read somewhere that some Python versions have their character widths set to 16, so that they won’t process any character code above FFFF, but must be tricked for proper rendering. I haven’t checked whether LMDE 6 and Mint 21.2 have such a Python version, or that they reduced the sizes of their font files, knowing that you don’t really need a font to load an icon, since the icons already exist in their own folders. We have such a folder in Gramps AIO too, for the Adwaita theme.
This is a preliminary conclusion drawn from what I read in the past days, regarding fonts, and the fact that the program shows that the icons are there, even though they don’t show via the route taken by Gramps.
I know that one indeed, but I also know one where Nick mentioned the specific unicode value(s) used for the icons in the Status column.
And the odd thing is, that the Python pogram that I found proves that you don’t need any unicode detour, because GTK can directly find an icon by name, in a way that is independent of the active font.
And here are some other odd things. The icon shows up in ubuntu 23.04 and ubuntu cinnamon 23.10.
And it also appears when I switch to theme Mint-X, or Adwaita, the theme that we include with Gramps AIO.
So the answer is, at least for Mint 21.2, that the issue can be solved by looking for files named document-open.png inside /usr/share/icons, and choosing one of the themes that has these files.
And I just found out that it is more complicated than that, because themes can inherit data from other themes. In other words, the fact that there is no document-open.png in a particular icon folder does not necessarily mean that the icon is not available.
On my laptop, with LMDE 5, the default theme is Mint-Y-Aqua, and there is no file named document-open.png anywhere inside /usr/share/icons/Mint-Y-Aqua.
There is a file named index.theme however, and the header of that file says:
[Icon Theme]
Name=Mint-Y-Aqua
Inherits=Mint-Y,Adwaita,gnome,hicolor
Comment=Icon theme built for Linux Mint. Uses elements of Vibrancy and Moka.
And on that system, the document-open icon can be found in the Adwaita, gnome, and hicolor folders, and a few others.
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