MBS Plugins and .ico creation?

Add-Ons
1

Hi,
I was informed that the MBS complete plugins (which I already own) make it possible to create .ico files.
Does anyone happen to know if there is any documentation regarding how to do this?

The documentation is soooooo gigantic, that I can never find information about anything :frowning:

Thank you all in advance.

2

check this out :smiley: and/or this

3

Icons for Mac or Win?

Because I think the plugin does only Mac icons there.

But GraphicsMagick plugin could be able to write ico file.

4

My OS X app already creates .icns files for OS X, but I now need to create .ico files for Windows.
I have looked in the GraphicsMagick examples folder, but can see no example there?

Thanks.

5

What platform is the app creating the ico files running on?

6

OS X

7

Imagemagick indeed lists ico as one of the formats it supports :

8

Michel,
according to that link it can only READ .ico, not write?

So basically, am I correct in thinking that MBS plugins cannot create .ico files, and an additional plugin is required?
Will definitely forget that idea then.

Thank you all so much for trying to help.

9

You are right. I read too fast. Sorry.

10

This can be done without plugins on OS X. Try using Picture.GetData(ā€œcom.microsoft.icoā€).

11

Joe - is that pure Xojo code, and if so - what part of the Language Reference should I look at?
I cannot work out what the com.microsoft.ico part of the code refers to?

Thaks.

12

Joe, this is intriguing. There is no mention of that in the LR at http://documentation.xojo.com/index.php/Picture.GetData

And it does not seem like FromData would create an ico back, right ?

13

[quote=191914:@Richard Summers]Joe - is that pure Xojo code, and if so - what part of the Language Reference should I look at?
I cannot work out what the com.microsoft.ico part of the code refers to?

Thaks.[/quote]

Itā€™s a uniform type identifier, which can be passed to FromData on OS X. Passing it on other platforms wonā€™t work.

14

I think FromData on OS X can parse an ico file, but it definitely wonā€™t retain the multiple representations that are inside of it.

15

Ok, I seem to be missing something here?

The code Joe posted looks like it reads an image file, and puts it into a memory block.
Am I correct in thinking that I then need to use FromData, to output this memory block data as a .ico file?

If so, I can see no info in the LR which explains how to output as a .ico? it simply shows how to load it into an image well.

I have also just noticed that Joe said it would not retain any other representations included - which really makes the entire exercise completely pointless :frowning:

Thanks anyway.

16

Yeah, thatā€™s a fair point. I hadnā€™t thought of that initially when I posted.

17

Iā€™m sorry. GraphicsMagick does not do ICO file writing.

And so far I only did it on Windows via API functions.
But you can of course just code yourself a function to write those files.
The format should not be too hard.

18

CGImageDestination can create .ico files, but it doesnā€™t create any of the newer resolutions.

last time I looked at the .ico format, they were just a string of Windows bitmap images.

19

Slightly more complicated than that, but not too bad. Thereā€™s some documentation on the ICO Wikipedia page, which seems like it contains all of the information you need. If youā€™re targeting Vista and later, you only have to worry about putting PNGs in the ICO.

For fun, hereā€™s some history of the format:

20

Norman created an iCO exporter for Richard from the Wikipedia page back in October 2014 :
https://forum.xojo.com/16314-create-a-ico-file?search=%22ico+exporter%22