Hey there,

I'm pretty new to Inkscape, so please forgive me any silly question. I love the software, it is absolutely amazing what it can do. Congrats to the developers!

One thing though, I need to re-design lots of old svg icons and I would like to apply the same drop shadow effect to all of them. However, it looks like, I need to adjust the drop shadow offset and blur parameter for each icon individually, as the results vary with each object. Any ideas, what I did wrong? The icons come from different svg files with different document properties, however, I still have the same problem if I copy them all into the same document and scale them manually to roughly the same size.

Thanks for your help!

the problem is that the engines that display svg icons, like Qt only implement the smallest sub-set of the whole standard. In the case of Gnome and KDE (which relies on Qt SVG classes) it's the SVG-Tiny spec. So because of this Gtk+ apps show them differently than Qt apps. (remember the bad old days od Firefox vs. IE and the way you had to author for BOTH because their renderers were so different? yeah. it's like that.

So... the way around it... is to either to tiled combinations of radial and straight gradients. (I'm actually working on a basic tutorial for this - but it's a bit tricky and fun) OR convert the object to a path if it's not already, set the transparency to like 2 or 3 and use ctrl+) to expand it then Ctrl_d to duplicate, rinse, repeat until you have a drop shadow.

either thing will display reliably in any context because it's within the MINIMUM spec of SVG.

Hope that helps. You can email or PM me if you need a walk through. Otherwise.. welcome to Inkscape!

Hey slobeck,

thanks a lot for the explanation! Man, I thought we are through those times
Are there any hidden attributes in the svg files, such as scale or dimension, which would have an effect onto the offset values of the "drop shadow" filter?

Many thanks also for the workarounds. I got the strange feeling though that eihter way, adding a drop shadow to >200icons will be a pain I will try your suggestions as I think it migght be easier that way.

"Same drop shadow effect."

The offset value is defined by pixels in the filter, unlike the blurring which radius is defined by percentage.
The first one should look the same on every single object, while the latter should vary depending on the size of the object it is applied on.

So if you want to add a consistent look make sure all the objects filtered have the same size.
Like, group them with a larger transparent object as a brute-force solution.
Or group all the objects-icons together and add the filter to the group.

slobeck wrote:the problem is that the engines that display svg icons, like Qt only implement the smallest sub-set of the whole standard. In the case of Gnome and KDE (which relies on Qt SVG classes) it's the SVG-Tiny spec. So because of this Gtk+ apps show them differently than Qt apps. (remember the bad old days od Firefox vs. IE and the way you had to author for BOTH because their renderers were so different? yeah. it's like that.

So... the way around it... is to either to tiled combinations of radial and straight gradients. (I'm actually working on a basic tutorial for this - but it's a bit tricky and fun) OR convert the object to a path if it's not already, set the transparency to like 2 or 3 and use ctrl+) to expand it then Ctrl_d to duplicate, rinse, repeat until you have a drop shadow.

either thing will display reliably in any context because it's within the MINIMUM spec of SVG.

Hope that helps. You can email or PM me if you need a walk through. Otherwise.. welcome to Inkscape!

Did you ever get around to writing that up? I'm trying to figure out that exact process and have so far failed.