Google Material Symbols Support?

[hardcodet]

Hey Jan :)

First of all thanks for the icon packs - we've been using them happily for a few months now, and they saved us tons of time.

We're in the process of switching over to Material Design, and I noticed that you are providing the (legacy) Material Design icon set, but not the new Material Symbols. They can both be browsed at https://fonts.google.com/icons (see dropdown in the "Style" options), and I noticed a few times already that the new Symbols library actually would provide the better alternatives. Any chance we may see those in MahApps someday?

Cheers!

[punker76]

Hey Philipp @hardcodet ,

I played a little bit with the svg npm package and decided to split the icons in to 3 separated packages for Outlined, Rounded and Sharp. Because every packaged contains their filled equivalent. For all in one package this would mean 3*7460 icons....

What do you think about this decision?

[hardcodet]

Hi @punker76 and sorry for the late reply!

TL;DR:
I think that's a fair decision - in the end, those aren't different styles but seem to define mostly strokes and corners, not distinct visual styles. I would expect that the vast majority of devs would (and probably should ;) use one style and not mix them. On the other hand, unless there's no performance impact, it may not matter much in the first place.

Longer:

• one could think about cost: Would the triple weight (and additional discriminator in the icon class) introduce a performance impact (assuming we have a grid with a few hundred icons), or just eat a little bit of RAM to load the package? If it's basically zero cost for any developer, it wouldn't hurt.

• we would have to specify the style everywhere we declare an icon (I assume you wouldn't provide 3x more enum values, but a discriminator on the control that would be stylable, too), e.g.

  <iconPacks:PackIconMaterialSymbol Kind="AutoFixHigh" IconStyle="Rounded" />
  

  that looks a bit tedious, but then, you could just set a default, and we could simply write a default style that set's that IconStyle property for the whole application and be fine, too. So again, a bit of complexity, but not much pain.

• With 3 packages, if I absolutely wanted full control, I could still write a control that acts as a proxy in front of the three libraries, which should be straightforward (assuming the enums are the same in all three packages or even shared).

So, bottom line: Probably both are absolutely valid. If your gut tells you to split them, I think that's a good decision. Thanks for the awesome work! ❤️