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                 Anthony's X Icon Library (version 1.5)
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               Color Formats Available and Formats Used.
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  The X consortium have yet to formally support a color icon format,
like they do for X Bitmap files. Some support, however, exists for the
xpm format, though that support is mostly because xpm have been in place
for so long.


PbmPlus Format (ppm) :-

  The Poskanzer's extended Portable Bitmap library (ppm icons) has been
around now since 1990. This package provides converters, to convert to
and from almost any other icon and picture format available, and new
converters are being published all the time, though I'd wish someone
would colect them all together and re-publish the PbmPlus package.

  This allows users to easilly convert icons from one format into
another format easly, using the intermediate PbmPlus format. The ppm
format can be in either a binary (for small size) or in a ascii format
(for mailing) completely interchangably. 

The Latest Pbm Plus package can be found on the X ftp site
  
      ftp.x.org  :   /contrib/netpbm-13oct93.tar.gz

or any other mirrors of this site. New xpm converters for this package
are also available in the comp.sources.misc archieves, look for
`ppmtoxpm' in the archie database.


X Pixmap Format (xpm) :-

  The X Pixmap format is quite compact, and they can be easilly edited
using a simple text editor. The format however seems to breakdown to some
extent when more than 50 colors are present in the image. When this
happens a string of 2 or more characters are used to represent each
pixel, and it becomes difficult to edit with a text editor.

  Many programs support the xpm format, but not all of them. The `xv'
program for instance doesn't support it and it is one of the major ways
of viewing and using icons. Also just about all the programs to tile the
root window do not seem to support this format. As such icons in this
format for use as bachground tiling patterns are useless.

  Xpm's however do have a `transparent color' built into it. Also in the
past, it has had many `incompatable' revisions, which means
that icons in xpm format may or may not work depending on the xpm
version in use at your site. Outdated icons are around, and believe me I
have found a large number of them.  These are particularly troublesome
for the PbmPlus programs. Luckly the xpm distribution also provides
a conversion program, and a PbmPlus filter.

  Recently two programs have become available to allow you to easilly edit
these icons.  And a long time coming they were too. These are pixmap, by
Lionel Mallet, which can handle the transparent color, however, its color
selection mechnism is much to be desired.

  The other is xpaint, by David Koblas, koblas@netcom.com. This program is
very good with execlant cut and paste features, and a customisable
palette.  The program however has many unresolved bugs, which I hope will
be fixed sometime (soon) in the future.  My own preferance is the latter,
bugs and all. Both of these xpm editors are available in the X contrib
area.


Graphic Interchange Format (gif) :-

  Gifs is a compressed picture format, however it seems not to be a very
common format for icon images. It does however seem to be the defacto
standard for large pictures, and as such is understood by various set root
window programs.
  Other Picture formats TIFF, MACP (not color), Amiga IFF, etc are also
available but do not seem to be as wide spread or as usable as the gif
picture format.


Current Solution :-

  The color icons in this collection are currently formated using the X
Pixmap format version 3.2g. However due to the lack of root window programs
that use the X pixmap format, I have formated the color background tile
patterns using the Gif image format. This format looks to be understood
common color xsetroot programs such as "xv" and "xloadimage".  Also as
this is a compressed format, the largish 128x128 images are a reasonable
size.


  Anthony Thyssen - (SysProg @ Griffith University)     anthony@cit.gu.edu.au
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    Any smoothly functioning technology
             will have the appearance of magic.    - Arthur C. Clarke
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