Server Test 88

Harold L Hunt II huntharo@msu.edu
Mon Jun 2 12:38:00 GMT 2003


Benny,

Benjamin Riefenstahl wrote:
> Hi Lev,
> 
> 
> Lev Bishop <lev.bishop@yale.edu> writes:
> 
>>On a related note, even the default 'X' icon that's used for xterms,
>>etc, and is presumably built into xwin.exe, well it looks fine when
>>alt-tabbing and on the taskbar, but the version on the windows
>>title-bar and the version in the system tray, well they're pretty
>>nasty.
> 
> 
> Yeah, I got this too.
> 
> The defaukt icon obviously comes from the icon resource in XWin.exe.
> Such resources can have small icons 16x16 and large ones 32x32 and
> both are actually present.  Problem is that the icons on the title and
> in the taskbar are scaled to 24x24 on my setup, so Windows must do
> some internal scaling.  It's curious they don't do a better job of it,
> I know that one of my own applications written for Win 3.x some years
> ago could do this better by adding a standard Windows blur effect.
> 

Looking at the icon with an icon editor (see below) shows that it has 
four formats:

32 x 32 - 256 color
32 x 32 - 16 color
16 x 16 - 256 color
16 x 16 - 16 color

All of them actually look pretty good at their native sizes.  However, 
scaling the 32 x 32's down to 24 x 24 looks like crap, depending on the 
color that you send them to.

I was able to make a pretty good 24 x 24 - 16 color icon without much 
trouble.  I also made a 24 x 24 - 256 color icon.  Now I suppose we 
should change the patch that Colin sent in to load the 24 x 24 icon 
instead of the 16 x 16 icon for the tray.  I might give that a shot.

> I was going to try to improve the default icon so that it scales
> better, but I haven't yet found a decent way of editing icons with
> free tools.

The free editor I found was here:

http://www.bouffler.freeserve.co.uk/icon_edit.htm


Harold



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