ICONIZE 1.00 JUNE 6, 1987 By Stephen Vermeulen 3635 Utah Dr. N.W., Calgary, Alberta, CANADA, T2N 4A6 Copyright (C) 1987 By Stephen Vermeulen This version may be freely redistributed so long as not charge is made for such distribution. --------------------------------------------------------------------- 0.0 Introduction Iconize is a program that takes a full size Amiga picture and reduces it in an antialiased fashion by a factor you specify. The program was written primarily to supply a simple CLI tool which can be used to make custom icons for paintings. To make a custom icon for a painting you follow these steps: 1. Iconize the painting to produce a miniture replica. 2. Recolor the painting to reduce the number of colours to the four allowed on the workbench. 3. Use the brush to icon program to convert the Iconized and Recolored painting to an icon. For some paintings it might be better to Recolor the full size painting first and then Iconize it down to the desired size. The real loss in image quality comes when the Recoloring is done since the WorkBench colours are so screwy. Of course the files that Iocnize works with are all IFF ILBM type files so it is fully compatible with the rest of your Amiga software. 1.0 Running Iconize Iconize can only be run from the CLI (this will probably be fixed soon). There are two ways of invoking it. First just typing: Iconize will result in the copyright notice, short instructions, and the version number being printed. By typing a command of the following format: Iconize input.pic output.pic factor_x factor_y Iconize will process the input file "input.pic", rescaling it by the supplied factors. When it is done it will write the output to the file "output.pic". The values of factor_x and factor_y must be a positive, non-zero, integers. That is you can use 1, 2, 3, 4... To display various sizes of paintings on the WorkBench screen as icons consult the following table for suggestions on "good" values for the factors: Painting Size Factor_x Factor_y ------------- -------- -------- 320 x 200 3 6 640 x 200 6 6 320 x 400 3 12 640 x 400 6 12 Note that the values of the factors are not usually equal for the best results, this is because the WorkBench has highly non-square pixels! 2.0 Memory Usage Iconize needs to allocate 2 complete picture buffers, so if you have a 512K machine you might find it difficult to Iconize HiRes 16 colour pictures. The first buffer is the same size as the picture, but the second buffer is only as large as the finnished product. Iconize works REAL NICE on a 2.5Meg Amiga! 3.0 Support Any comments, suggestions, or bug reports you might care to make will be gratefully received. If you are interested in seeing this program improve much send a contribution ($10-$20 to me at the address above). My current policy on improving the program is to release a new version for every 5 contributions I receive, or when I need a new feature!