SVG to ICONS

SVG to ICONS is a powerful command-line utility designed to streamline the conversion of SVG files into high-quality, production-ready icon sets for both Windows and macOS environments, complete with automatic dark theme variants. This tool simplifies the process of generating multiple icon formats and sizes, ensuring versatility and adaptability in UI design.

Output Structure

When converting an SVG file (for example, logo.svg), the tool produces a dedicated subfolder named after the file, containing the following:

logo/
├── logo.ico                        # Windows light theme (multi-resolution: 16–256px)
├── logo_dark.ico                   # Windows dark theme
├── logo_mac_template.png           # macOS menu bar, black (system auto-adapts light/dark)
├── logo_mac_template@2x.png        # macOS menu bar, black, Retina
y├── logo_mac_template_dark.png      # macOS menu bar, white (for Electron / non-native)
├── logo_mac_template_dark@2x.png   # macOS menu bar, white, Retina
└── png/
    ├── light/
    │   ├── logo_16x16.png
    │   ├── logo_32x32.png
    │   └── ...up to 512x512
    └── dark/
        └── ...same sizes, inverted

Requirements

To get started, ensure the following Python packages are installed:

pip install cairosvg pillow

For macOS, if the installation of cairosvg fails, it may be necessary to install Cairo using Homebrew:

brew install cairo

For Windows, the GTK3 runtime must be installed to support Cairo; alternatively, consider using the Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL).

Usage Examples

The invocation of the tool is straightforward:

# Generate icons from a single SVG file
python generate_icons.py logo.svg

# Generate icons from multiple SVG files
python generate_icons.py icon1.svg icon2.svg icon3.svg

# Using a glob pattern (bash/zsh)
python generate_icons.py assets/*.svg

Options

The --ico-only, --mac-only, and --png-only flags are mutually exclusive.

Additional Examples

To illustrate more advanced usages:

# Generate only ICO files, skip dark variants, and output to the ./dist directory
python generate_icons.py *.svg --ico-only --no-dark --out-dir ./dist

# Specify custom PNG sizes for output
python generate_icons.py logo.svg --png-only --png-sizes 32,64,128

# Generate macOS icons for all SVGs in a specified folder
python generate_icons.py assets/*.svg --mac-only

Platform Considerations

macOS

The generated files named *Template.png will automatically adapt to the menu bar's appearance without requiring additional code modifications for light or dark mode support. The _dark variants provide compatibility for frameworks that do not support the template convention:

Windows

Since Windows system tray icons do not automatically adjust to theme changes, it is essential to detect the active theme at runtime and swap icons accordingly using appropriate event listeners and APIs.