Lubuntu, a flavor of Ubuntu, ships with a few icon themes including elementary.
Since many of the icons are .svg
files, it's somewhat easy to make minor tweaks to suit one's visual preferences.
While doing so, I noticed a feature common to several .svg
icons which I don't understand. I hope to illustrate this feature with an small example:
In the image above, consider system-restart-panel.svg
. I'm including its code after scouring for brevity:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" standalone="no"?>
<!-- Created with Inkscape (http://www.inkscape.org/) -->
<svg id="svg3211" xmlns:rdf="http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#" xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg" height="16" width="12" version="1.0" xmlns:cc="http://creativecommons.org/ns#" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink" xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/">
<defs id="defs3213">
<linearGradient id="linearGradient2878" y2="5" gradientUnits="userSpaceOnUse" x2="15.5" gradientTransform="translate(-6,-4)" y1="19" x1="15.5">
<stop id="stop4629-22-2" stop-color="#49a3d2" offset="0"/>
<stop id="stop4631-4-9" stop-color="#3470b4" offset=".705"/>
<stop id="stop4633-7-6" stop-color="#1b5699" offset="1"/>
</linearGradient>
</defs>
<path id="path3224" opacity=".7" d="m6 2v2c-3.31 0-6 2.69-6 6s2.69 6 6 6 6-2.69 6-6h-2c0 2.2-1.79 4-4 4s-4-1.8-4-4c0-2.21 1.79-4 4-4v2l5-3-5-3z" fill-rule="evenodd" fill="#fff"/>
<path id="path4199" d="m6 1v2c-3.31 0-6 2.69-6 6s2.69 6 6 6 6-2.69 6-6h-2c0 2.2-1.79 4-4 4s-4-1.8-4-4c0-2.21 1.79-4 4-4v2l5-3-5-3z" fill-rule="evenodd" fill="url(#linearGradient2878)"/>
</svg>
The common feature I referred to above is the presence of (in this case) path3224
. This path has fill="#fff"
and is slightly offset from the "real" visible path, path4199, which has a gradient of blues.
In short, my question is this: what is the purpose of this other path?