The first is that you have something you want to use as an icon. I'm not making a lot of assumptions, but I am making a few, and they're all critical. What Assumptions I Am Making In This Tutorial ICO because this will give us platform-interchangeable icon image file data. However, for purposes of this tutorial, we're going to focus exclusively on. Over the years, various Linux desktop environments have come to embrace a number of options, including. Here is a Wikipedia article which takes a deeper dive into. Microsoft created a container file format which can store either BMP or PNG data called ICO. For purposes of a storage device itself (a hard drive, a USB flash drive, etc.) you need two things: an information file, called "autorun.inf", that defines which specific image file to use as a device's custom icon and of course an appropriate image file for that purpose. Now, I do not know and will not pretend to know the precise histories for Windows' and the various Linux desktop environments' use of icons and the means to edit or otherwise customize them, but what I can say is that largely they work the same. Suffice it to say that the processes for using custom icons in Classic Mac OS / Mac OS X / macOS, and icons for Linux and Windows, are mutually exclusive and have to be done separately. Because this tutorial does not concern Apple's processes, I am not going to include how-to instructions relative to them. their desktop environment) and so adding a custom icon could now be accomplished by copy-n-pasting (and desk accessories transitioned into becoming actual independent, mini-programs instead of embedded resource micro-programs). However, starting with System 7 and moving forward into Systems 8 and 9, Apple gradually pushed some of this functionality into the Finder (i.e. Its user interface roughly resembles old-school file managers, as well as many FTP programs. Users wanting to add or remove fonts or desk accessories from their operating system, up through Mac OS 6.x, would use a specialized resource editing program called Font/DA Mover. One of the most widely-used programs for doing this last-mile work was ResEdit. This had the advantage of guaranteeing their program's user interface always had access to that font, and no additional action needed to be taken by the end user. As another example, some programs required specific fonts, and so a font would be created or otherwise acquired by the author, and using the same process just described, would embed the font in their program. For example, one might have made a program with sounds for user interface elements, or sounds for a game. Once a sound was created and saved, that file would be opened using a special utility called a resource editor, the sound component copied, and then pasted inside of the program one was making which needed that sound. Two classic examples of this are fonts and sounds, but this broadly applies to a wide variety of resource types. The Macintosh platform has traditionally used the method of embedding resources within a file (or a program) as a way of containing them. Even though this tutorial is about creating icon files for Linux and Windows, I want to start with some brief comments about Classic Mac OS, Mac OS X, and macOS, mostly to explain what the difference is. While I would recommend you read through it, if you are an experienced user of technology, you can skip to section 2 to dig into the process.Įver since the beginning of graphical user interfaces, there has been a need for icons, and in turn there's been a need for a data format as well as a mechanism to associate the image with the object to be represented. This article is broken up into 3 sections, the first of which is general background information. Do you want to use GIMP to create your own custom icon files for use in many different Linux desktop environments, and/or Windows? If so, this is the article you are looking for.
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