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iljitsch

Posted Mon Jul 26, 2021 6:43 am

You're absolutely right, support for larger icons would be better. So I've been working on that: here is Iconverter version 0.9. ;)

The reason the old version wouldn't support icons larger than 93 pixels wide or 93 pixels high is because this is a limitation of the NewIcons extension.

ColorIcons, on the other hand, support a maximum of 256 pixels wide and/or high. (Still not enough to convert the ginormous IconMaster icon, though.) The new version of Iconverter now supports ColorIcons, and creates those by default. (You can still create NewIcons with the -newicon option.)

I initially thought NewIcons would be more compatible, as the NewIcons package has been around for a long time and can even work under AmigaOS 2.x. ColorIcons, on the other hand, were introduced with AmigaOS 3.5. However, it turns out that AmigaOS 3.1.4 also supports ColorIcons and with IconLib_46.4 you can have ColorIcons under AmigaOS 3.0. (And even PNG icons!)

Aside from the larger maximum size, ColorIcons use less disk space than NewIcons and there's an extra option to handle borders. So for these reasons I decided to make ColorIcons the default for Iconverter.

About the borders: as of WB 2.0, the Workbench draws a 3D border around all icons. I never liked that, so I always used a tool to turn this off. However, with NewIcons the icon can ask the Workbench to not draw a border around it. So that's perfect for WB 1.x icons converted by Iconverter for those of us who want to see WB 2.0+ icons with borders as intended, but WB 1.x icons without borders, also as intended.

Unfortunately, IconLib46 doesn't honor this request and it always draws a border, unless you use a tool like Birdie to turn off those borders. In that case, if you still want a border for certain icons, you'll have to use Iconverter's -border hard option. (You can even do -border both and get two borders if borders aren't turned off...)

Another improvement in version 0.9 is that it can read the palette to use to convert icons from the palette in an IFF file or from a the settings on a WB 1.x disk. So if you have a Workbench 1.x disk with a customized palette, the converted icons will then also have that palette. Looking around in my ADF and DMS files, I found a few demos that have a custom palette, but none of them load the Workbench so so far I haven't been able to try this for real.

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iljitsch

Posted Mon Jul 26, 2021 12:04 pm

I was on a roll so I made a few other improvements and uploaded Iconverter version 0.95.

In this version some minor issues were solved and the program will apply conversion settings based on whether the original icon was the backfill or complement type. So you'll often get good results without trying a lot of settings.

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McTrinsic

Posted Mon Jul 26, 2021 1:40 pm

PeterK‘s IconLibrary from Aminet does have a small utility to remove borders.

http://aminet.net/package/util/libs/IconLib_46.4

... or were these called frames??

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iljitsch

Posted Mon Jul 26, 2021 11:44 pm

Yes, in the IconLib documentation as well as the icon format description I found these are called "frames" but in the 3.1.4 prefs "borders". The IconLib documentation also says frames will never be shown for certain icons because of that flag, but in my case there's always borders/frames.

I tried the little tools included with IconLib but they didn't work. I guess that's because I run WB 3.0 on top of KS 3.1 on my 3000... And that's only as of last year, before that it was on OS 2.0. :o

About IconLib: I'm not sold on it. The features that it brings are very cool, but the experience isn't great on an older/slower machine, even with an RTG card. Having to unload the ROM icon.library is a hassle, and even though the icons look great in 24-bit or even 15/16-bit mode, that takes a lot of memory (only 8 MB fast RAM) and it's slow. Still pretty good and faster in 256 colors, but not enough to be worth the extra hassle, IMO. Upgrading to 3.2 probably makes more sense.

BTW, Birdie is pretty cool in its own right: it lets you use a pattern for your window borders, so I guess you could make a 2.0+ system look more like WB 1.x.

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iljitsch

Posted Wed Aug 11, 2021 12:21 pm

I just uploaded version 1.0 of Iconverter to Aminet. You can of course also get it here.

There's a ton of new stuff in it compared to the initial 0.8 release, and also a good number of refinements over the 0.95 release mentioned here earlier. Download the file and look at the changes section in the Iconverter.txt file for all the details.

As you can see here Iconverter will use the appropriate settings automatically much more often now:
Example.png
The main thing is that Iconverter will now by default write ColorIcons (i.e., the AmigaOS 3.5 type icons, but also supported in 3.1.4 and 3.2, and if you install Iconlib46). However, if you prefer, you can still generate NewIcons.

A nice new feature with ColorIcons is that you can selectively turn off the border around icons. Iconverter will do that automatically where appropriate, but you can of course fully control this yourself.

Iconverter can now also read both NewIcons and ColorIcons, so you can use the tool to convert one to the other.

And you can read the palette to be used to convert icons from an IFF file or a system-configuration file.

Icons as large as 512x512 can be converted to BMP files. (NewIcons only support 93x93, ColorIcons 256x256.)

Let me know what you think.





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