Haiku Vector Icon Format (HVIF) is a vector storage format designed to store icons, specifically for Haiku

Haiku (operating system)

Haiku is a free and open source operating system compatible with BeOS. Its development began in 2001, and the operating system became self-hosting in 2008, with the first alpha release in September 2009, the second in May 2010 and the third in June 2011....

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History

Haiku developers commonly agreed that Haiku could not be released with original BeOS R5

BeOS R5

BeOS R5 is the final version of BeOS from Be Inc.. It was released in March 2000, and came in two varieties: Professional and Personal.R5 was the 4th major release of BeOS for a public audience, and the 6th since it left developer-only stages. It changed only slightly from the previous release,...

 icons. Since Haiku needed its own artwork anyway, it was thought that icons could switch to vectors graphics from traditional BeOS bitmaps. In July 2006 Haiku developer Stephan Aßmus introduced Icon-O-Matic, the icon editor of Haiku, and a storage format with a rendering engine based on Anti-Grain Geometry

Anti-Grain Geometry

Anti-Grain Geometry is a high-quality 2D rendering library written in C++. It features anti-aliasing and sub-pixel resolution.The library is operating system independent and renders to an abstract memory object. It comes with examples interfaced to the X Window System, Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X,...

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After a few days of discussion, Aßmus announced a contest to determine an icon theme for Haiku. He stated that there was no guideline that had to be followed and suggested 1 September as deadline. 16 icon sets were rated in the contest, and Aßmus' icon set "Stippi" received the award. In early November it was also announced that Stephan Aßmus implemented vector icons in OpenTracker

OpenTracker

OpenTracker is the open source version of the Tracker file manager for BeOS-compatible operating systems.Be Inc. developed the original Tracker for their operating system, BeOS. In 2000, prior to selling all of their assets to Palm, Inc., Be Inc. open-sourced some of their software, including Tracker...

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HVIF icons of Stippi set are used in current Haiku releases and builds.

Features

Aiming fast rendering and small file sizes, HVIF brings following approaches:

• Icons have a native size of 64×64 pixels
• Integer coordinates from -32 to +95 and a 8th bit to indicate non-integer coordinates are used to reduce the size.
• There are three basic path types: path with commands, path with straight lines only and path with curves only.
• There are four different path commands introduced for icon creating: horizontal line, vertical line, cubic curve.
• Since a great precision is not needed, it uses its own floating point format for storing transformation matrices, resulting a matrix size of 18 bytes, which is considerably smaller than the transformation matrix size of 24 or 48 bytes in other formats.
• There are two types of styles: plain color and gradient.
• Flags are used to specify what aspects of the objects should be stored in the file, so that unused sections don't take up space.
• HVIF data consists of three sections: First one encodes styles, the second the paths and the third the shapes.
• Styles and paths are global to an icon with a maximum number of 256 for each, so that can be reused by different shapes by referring to them with one byte.
• The icons have an average size of 500–700 bytes, which is smaller than commonly used bitmap
  Bitmap
  In computer graphics, a bitmap or pixmap is a type of memory organization or image file format used to store digital images. The term bitmap comes from the computer programming terminology, meaning just a map of bits, a spatially mapped array of bits. Now, along with pixmap, it commonly refers to...
  
   or vector graphics
  Vector graphics
  Vector graphics is the use of geometrical primitives such as points, lines, curves, and shapes or polygon, which are all based on mathematical expressions, to represent images in computer graphics...
  
   icons.
• Because of their small size, icons can be stored within inode of files. Therefore the name, the size, the date and the icon of a file can be read by Tracker within a single disk operation.
• Unlike other vector graphics formats, the icons are rendered in a single pass except for some cases like transparency, causing no visible seams between shapes.

External links

• Haiku Icons by zuMi
• Haiku icons in Haiku source repository
• Icon-O-Matic article in Haiku user guide