RE: bad tool-bar icons in Emacs 22.1 release

[Drew Adams]

> >> I'm not sure if this is what your asking for, but for nicer icons, you
> >> need to install some image DLLs (see the README below).
> >
> > No, I wasn't looking for nicer icons (but thanks anyway).
> > I was reporting a bug in the Emacs 22.1 release (with the
> > default icons).
>
> The nicer color icons (GNOME/GTK/style; see e.g. etc/images/save.xpm)
> are "the default icons" [1].  They only require external image
> libraries whereas the monochrome PBM/PGM/PPM icons are supported by
> natively by the Emacs binary w/o further libs (DLLs on Windows), see
> the README file cited previously.
>
> [1] I'd consider the monochrome icons as a fallback e.g. for
>     monochrome displays.

You might consider color to be the default, but for Windows, you don't get
color by default - you must install external image libraries. You might
consider B&W to be only a fallback for monochrome displays, but it is also
the default installation for color displays on Windows: out of the box, that
is, with just the downloaded zip or tar, you get B&W. If you follow
additional instructions, performing additional steps (optional), then you
can get color.

To my understanding of "default", the default for Windows is B&W, not color.

Nothing wrong with that, if it's unavoidable, but let's not pretend that the
default is color if a user needs to jump through extra hoops (on Windows) to
get color. BTW, when was the last time anyone saw Windows used with a
monochrome display?

This is one reason that I support the idea of an Emacs installer for
Windows, such as the one Lennart Borgman supplies. Windows users are used to
simply pushing a button to get something installed, perhaps answering yes or
no a few times to simple customization questions, and perhaps changing a
location or two - that's it. They are less used to digging out and reading
READMEs with instructions about possibly downloading supplemental packages
and installing them to obtain optional features. That happens sometimes, but
it is not very common. It certainly doesn't happen for something as basic as
color support.

Wrt color: I've installed lots of programs on Windows, and I've never had to
do anything special to get them to be color-able or color-aware. For many
Windows users, this will reflect poorly on Emacs, I'm afraid, not on
Windows. They see color everywhere in Windows, so they will not think this
is something lacking in Windows - they will think that it is something
lacking in Emacs. Which, in a sense, it is ;-).

I don't use Lennart's installer myself, BTW, because AFAIK it bundles other
things that I don't want, it sets up a version of server/client that I don't
want, and it makes assumptions of where I want to put Emacs etc. Still, I
think the idea of an installer is a good one, even if I personally use just
a zip file of vanilla Emacs. (Please note the "AFAIK" - I haven't tried
Lennart's installer in a while, and I might be mistaken about it.)

> >> Looks like a bug.  But I couldn't reproduce this when using
> >> emacs-22.1-bin-i386.zip without further DLLs.
> >
> > Did you do just what I did? I downloaded and installed first the full
> > Windows binary distrib (i.e. bin, not barebin), and then downloaded and
> > installed the full source distrib, on top of the Windows binary
> > distrib. See my description for details.
>
> No, I downloaded and unzipped emacs-22.1-bin-i386.zip.  But I doubt
> that it makes a difference WRT the misaligned icons.

You might doubt it, and you might be right. But from your and my
descriptions, that is the only difference between what we each did. Either
our descriptions are incomplete or that difference is significant. To
reproduce a bug, it's usually not a bad idea to follow the recipe provided
;-).