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| 4 | <TITLE>Creating and converting icons</TITLE> |
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| 17 | Creating and converting icons |
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| 25 | Icons are bitmaps that may contain transparency information. Under X, icons are |
| 26 | usually created from XPM files, which may be loaded from a file or created from |
| 27 | data embedded in a C++ source file.<P> |
| 28 | |
| 29 | Under Windows, icon files (extension .ico) may contain multiple icons for different sizes and colour |
| 30 | depths, and can be loaded from a file or loaded from the Windows resources compiled |
| 31 | into the executable.<P> |
| 32 | |
| 33 | You can decide to use only XPMs on Windows and Unix, or you could use XPMs on Unix and |
| 34 | Windows icons under Windows -- the latter will require some #ifdefs in your code or use of the wxICON macro.<P> |
| 35 | |
| 36 | If you are using a compiler such as Borland C++, Visual C++ or Watcom C++, you |
| 37 | can use the provided icon editor. However, if using Cygwin or Mingw32, there |
| 38 | is no icon editor so you must obtain one separately, such as <a href="http://hotfiles.zdnet.com/cgi-bin/texis/swlib/hotfiles/info.html?fcode=00165P">IconEdit32</a>.<P> |
| 39 | |
| 40 | To convert from XPM to BMP (which can be loaded or pasted into an icon editor to save as an ICO file), |
| 41 | you can use Vadim Zeitlin's <a href="ftp://biolpc22.york.ac.uk/pub/support/xpm2bmp.exe">xpm2bmp.exe</a> utility. |
| 42 | To convert from BMP to XPM, you can use <a href="ftp://biolpc22.york.ac.uk/pub/support/bmp2xpm.exe">bmp2xpm.exe</a> |
| 43 | which is actually the old wxWidgets 1.68 utility, xpmshow. You will have to edit the resulting |
| 44 | file since the full path is used as the variable name, plus you may wish to specify a transparent colour e.g.:<P> |
| 45 | |
| 46 | <pre> |
| 47 | " s None c None", |
| 48 | </pre> |
| 49 | |
| 50 | This will indicate that the space character will be taken as the transparent colour throughout the image.<P> |
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