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UI icons workaround for Inkscape 0.91 on Windows

[Note: this issue has been solved with the release of Inkscape version 0.92 in January 2017.]

An 'In-x-scapable' problem

When version 0.91 of Inkscape, the famous free and open source SVG illustration program, was finally released last year (it took five years for it to jump from 0.48 directly to 0.91), fans were wowed by the new features.

However, a bug soon surfaced: Missing icons in toolbars and menus (they used to be there in the previous 0.48 version). This presentationally embarassing shortcoming usually happens on Inkscape 0.91 installed on Windows™ and OS X™:
Menu icons

Expected action icons, like document 'templates', 'revert', 'preferences', 'undo' and 'redo' were replaced by document icons with red 'x' on them. Also the right-to-left (RTL) icons, for right to left systems, remained at the left-to-right direction. However, the buttons still worked when pressed.

'undo' and 'redo' toolbar icons

This is not much of a problem for those on Linux, because Inkscape's default behavior is to get icons provided by the system first, and these are usually stock icons in the current iconset applied to the system. When Inkscape cannot find these icons in the system, it searches its SVG icon files and other files (libraries) that came with the installation, usually drawn in the stock GTK icon style.

However, in Windows and OS X systems, Inkscape cannot find some of the needed icons in its libraries. This is a bug that has been fixed for the next Inkscape version, 0.92x – release date unknown [edit: Jan 4, 2017]. Inkscape's developers are still at work on the 0.91.1 bugfix version (but there are 32-bit and 64-bit 'try-at-your-own-risk' developmental versions for download at TuxFamily.org – in the win32 and win64 folders, respectively).

Meanwhile, there are workarounds. For OS X, a workaround has already been included in the new installer.

For Inkscape 0.91 installed on Windows, you have to spend some effort. Go to your Inkscape user icons folder by entering the following command either in Windows Explorer or the 'run' dialog box (WIN+R keys):

%APPDATA%\inkscape\icons

In my case, this becomes 'C:\Users\Tommy\AppData\Roaming\inkscape\icons' (the AppData folder is usually hidden from Explorer). Create the icons folder if it doesn't exist. Now place a tweaked 'icons.svg' in that folder. The next time you start Inkscape, it will show the icons included in the new 'icons.svg' file. The trick there is that when the missing icons are included (with proper object IDs) in the icons.svg file, they show up properly on menus and toolbars instead of blank document icons with 'x's. Inkscape has its default icons.svg (usually in C:\Program Files\Inkscape\share\icons folder) but it is overridden by your icons.svg file placed in %APPDATA%\inkscape\icons.

In Linux, the user's Inkscape icons folder is:

~/.config/inkscape/icons

Now, where to find a modified icons.svg file? The quickest way is to Google for 'Inkscape missing icons'. That's what I did. ;-)

Icons.svg from the Web

Logo designer Nick Saporito, who provides a lot of good Inkscape tutorials on YouTube, designed and shared modern-looking main tool icons, in both light and dark styles:


(I used Solmiler's Placebo visual style 'Ashtray' for Windows 7 to show the dark-theme icons.) However, take note the rest of the icons in Nick Saporito's icons.svg modifications are still in the original GTK+ style (and, if you're on Windows™, the 'template', 'revert', 'undo' and 'redo' buttons may still be 'x'ed) so you may want to use another icons.svg iconset).

If you only want Inkscape darkened, you can follow these instructions from bhavyesh2567 from the Inkscape forums. The 7zip file comes with a modified gray monochrome Tango-style icons.svg intended to stand out in a dark background:

This still has missing 'templates', 'revert', 'undo' and 'redo' icons.

If you don't like the dark background but want the monochrome icons, download and use the icons.svg provided by samueldellicour in the same thread (this is a bigger-than-usual icons.svg file, as there are alternative icons, but the 'templates', 'revert', 'undo' and 'redo' icons are still 'x'ed on Windows):

Here's a flat gray version provided by Alexi Helligar:
Note that his screenshot was done in Linux so, even though his screenshots have the 'templates', 'revert', 'undo' and 'redo' icons, they're still in the old, non-flat GTK+ style. They're 'x'ed on Windows.

Un-Xed

As you can see, the previously-mentioned modified icons.svg may have changed the icon style, yet they still failed to address the 'x'ed icons problem on Windows (and some of them even changed icons to the point of unfamiliarity). I think this is a matter of using the proper icon ID verb tags in the icons.svg file. [Use the ones in parentheses (usually preceded by 'INKSCAPE_ICON' and with hyphens in between words) and put these in the ID field (without the double quotes) of the selected object's properties (CTRL+SHIFT+O)]:



If you want all the correct (un-'x'ed) icons, get the official bugfix icons.svg file from this Inkscape bug thread.

Another one, based on this, is BobSongs' modified icons.svg file (at the Inkscape forums) where "Edit > Undo" and "Edit > Redo" are coloured differently than their original counterparts to work against a more darker grey system theme.

 These last two solve the 'x'ed icons on Windows. The official bugfix icon even has alternative icons for RTL systems, although I wasn't able to test these.

However, even with the 'x'ed icons solved on Windows, there's still a consistency problem as you can see below (using Alexi Helligar's modified icons.svg):

This is because some of the UI icons are not taken from the icons.svg file but from Inkscape's other library (DLL) files. Consequently, these are still in the old 'clip-arty' GTK+ style and may stick out like a sore thumb for some. If you don't want inconsistency, stick with the official bugfix icons.svg – although the icon style may turn you off. Inkscape may one day offload these icons from DLLs and put these in the icons.svg file where they can be customized.

Speaking of customizing icons, ten years ago, I still had the time (and the eyesight) to do that. I hope I could make a customized icons.svg file and share it to you one of these days. ;-)
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