README for mkicon
by Jonathon Fowler
jonof@edgenetwork.org
http://jonof.edgenetwork.org/?p=misc#mkicon

24 September 2004


Mkicon is a program I wrote to create Windows icon files from separate image
and mask images. Tired with all the decent icon creation software being
shareware or demoware, I made my own less-than-decent but perfectly suitable
substitite.


LICENSE AND WARRANTY

This program is licensed under the terms of the GNU General Public License
Version 2. See the included GPL.TXT file for the full text of the license.

The program carries no warranty of any kind. You use this completely at your
own risk. I deny all responsibility for this program.


USAGE

This program is light on any kind of comforts, but it's easy enough to use
if you make the effort. The program requires you give it 16- or 256-colour
Windows BMP files for the icon images, and 2-colour mask images. You can in
theory make icons of any size, but Windows standard sizes are 16x16, 32x32,
and 48x48 pixels in size. I haven't looked at making 24-bit icons for WinXP
yet but that feature may come one day.

MAKING THE ICON IMAGES

The areas of an icon that should be transparent should be black in the colour
image, and white in the mask image. Other configurations will give you odd
results. The mask image should have black for the regions of the icon that are
opaque. An example of how this works is shown in the included picture file
'sample.png'.

CREATING THE ICON

The program expects its first argument to be the filename of the output file.
After that it expects to see at least one pair of colour and mask image
filenames. You should list the images in descending order of size and colour
depth. eg. 48x48x256, 48x48x16, 32x32x256, 32x32x16, 16x16x256, 16x16x16.

All going well, you should have your icon.

RESLIST

Reslist is a small tool to dump out the contents of an icon or cursor (they
have the same basic format). You can use it to check out the internal
structure of an icon file. Just pass it the filename of the icon/cursor and
it will give you a lot of information about each resource header item and
each bitmap therein.


SOURCE CODE

This program was written to compile with MinGW, a port of GCC to Windows.
You can find out about it at http://www.mingw.org.