TIPS & TOOLS

 Tools that make excellent companions for you SysOps using ICO2RBO.

** Windows
ICONWRKS.* Icon Works 
ICOMAGIC.* Icon Magic 


** DOS
LICO10.*   List Icon 

** Windows *************************

Icon Works is a sample program that comes with Microsoft's Visual Basic.
This application which can be freely distributed, is the only icon editor
I've seen that lets you select a block of pixels and move them. This makes
modifying 32X32 Windows Icons to 30X30 Robo-Board Icons a breeze. It also
has many other powerful tools. It actually acts like 2 separate programs
an editor and an excellent viewer that displays all the icons in a directory
at once, allowing you to drag them to the editor.

The only problem that doesn't make this the complete solution, is the way it
handles the 16 solid color palette. You can't seem to get it to render the
light and dark shades all at once. If you change one color it can switch
other colors from the darker shade to the brighter shade. I've also noticed
when reading in an image that contains all the shades, it renders them all as
bright.  Maybe it's not so good for icons with many colors, but you can't
beat the pixel manipulation tools.

Icon Magic seems to do a fair job in the color rendering area, except the
light and dark gray is reversed.

I've noticed many Icon Editors behaving strangely with the color palette.
Some show dark gray were others show as light gray. Because of the
inconsistency between editors, I thought I'd go to the source. Microsoft's
Image Edit that comes with SDK for developers. It also didn't render the
shades consistently.  Borland's Resource Workshop seemed to be the only icon
editor to faithfully render the shades properly. Hence I used it as my
template for color mapping. At least Borland and Microsoft were consistent
with the light and dark gray.

If your having difficulty viewing the colors in your Windows icon editor.
Or your just not sure if your Windows icon editor is rendering the colors
right. Try taking a look at the file I've included COLORWIN.BMP using the
PaintBrush application that comes with Windows. This should show you the
proper and intended color rendering. This file is a copy of the COLORWIN.ICO
that has been enlarged and converted to a BMP.

If you find a ShareWare or FreeWare icon editor that consistently renders
the colors properly please let me know. I'll add it to any future TOOLS.TXT

* CAUTION * 
Another inconsistency observed with some icon editors, is that when the image 
only contains two colors (usually black & white) no data is written to the 16 
color area of the icon file. ICO2RBO only looks a the 16 color area not at
the XOR/AND mask area. The icon header may tell ICO2RBO that the image has 16
colors but not put anything there. ICO2RBO would not even attempt the
conversion if the header correctly stated 2 colors. What this means, is your
icon, when displayed in Robo-Board would be solid black or white. Since some
of your icons came from who knows what editor. If you find a 2 color Windows
icon that displays as a solid color in Robo, open the Windows icon with your
Windows editor and add a third color. This should force the editor to put
data in the 16 color area when you save the image.

* TIPS * 
When massaging your icons in Windows, use the powerful fill features of the
editors to fill the background with a unique color. This way when you bring
the icon into the Robo-FX Icon Editor, you can do an (X)change colors function
on the unique color to Robo's transparent.

To convert all the Windows Icons in any given directory to a Robo Icon Library,
use the supplied batch file MAKEALL.BAT or some variation on that.


** DOS *****************************

List Icon is not a Windows application but a DOS utility that displays
Windows Icons on your VGA (or EGA) graphics board. Comes with C source code.
Using this tool you can quickly browse all your Windows icons while in DOS.
It also has a switch that displays the file name under each image.

These tools are FREQable by Magic Name ICOTOOLS from:
MultiMedia Support BBS (619)578-0064 14.4K V32/42bis 
     WorldNet 62:1900/103
     RoboNet 90:1200/18
     FidoNet 1:202/1813
     SBCNet 13:600/4
and may be available from many other fine BBSs by each files name.

If you have any other tools that you think make great tools for Robo-Board
icons please let me know.
  -Dan