Icns2png

Welcome to Icon2PNG Linux Edition 0.5

* Copyright (C) 2002 Mathew Eis <mathew()bearca.com>
*
* This library is free software; you can redistribute it and/or
* modify it under the terms of the GNU Library General Public
* License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either
* version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.
*
* This library is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
* but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
* MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the GNU
* Library General Public License for more details.
*
* You should have received a copy of the GNU Library General Public
* License along with this library; if not, write to the
* Free Software Foundation, Inc., 59 Temple Place - Suite 330,
* Boston, MA 02111-1307, USA.
*

===============================================================================
Building Icon2PNG - Linux Edition

You will need a copy of libpng, and zlib. After building libpng, and zlib,
update the Makefile ZLIBINC, and LPNGINC to show the install paths for
zlib and libpng.

You should then only have to run
make
make test
make install

===============================================================================
Using Icon2PNG - Linux Edition

Basic Usage:
./icns2png OmniWeb.icns
Icon2PNG Linux Edition - (C) 2002 Mathew Eis
Converting OmniWeb.icns to OmniWeb.png...

This will result in a file OmniWeb.png with a 128x128 icon from OmniWeb.icns.

===============================================================================
Understanding the Mac OS X Icons

Mac OS X Icon files come in two formats - resource forks, and .icns files.

icns2png can convert both formats. It can also decode the resource forks
contained within MacBinary files.

The .icns files are much easier to deal with, since they are in a format that
can be easily accesed from Linux/UNIX/Windows.

You can however access the icons from the resource files. OS X Icons like
those from http://www.xicons.com/ are compressed in .sit files. These
files can be uncompressed using Aladdin Stuffit Expander for Linux, which
can be obtained from http://www.aladdinsys.com/.

When unstuffing, be sure to use a command similar to the following:

unstuff --text=auto --macbinary=auto --eol=unix icons.hqx.sit

This will help ensure that the resource forks are uncompressed into
MacBinary files, so that Icon2PNG can read them.

If there are resource forks in the files, when stuffit decompresses them,
it will create two files from the one mac file. For example, if the mac
file was named "Gnu", the resulting decomressed files will be
"Gnu", and "Gnu_1". The "Snowflake_1" file is the resource
fork. This is the file you will want to extract the icon from. The file
"Gnu" does not contain any icon data. If, however, there is no
"Gnu_1", then the file may be in the .icns format, and you will
extract the icon from "Gnu" - resulting in a file "Gnu.png"

It is really fairly simple, once you get the hang of it - you will also
notice that if the icon was in the resource fork, then the other main
file will be etremely small, sometimes even 0k.

The underlying data in both of the files is similar - they both hold the
following icon data (Although most icons to not have a complete set):
16x12 pixels - 1 bit mask - 1, 4, or 8 bit icon
16x16 pixels - 1 or 8 bit mask - 1, 4, 8 or 24 bit icon
32x32 pixels - 1 or 8 bit mask - 1, 4, 8, or 24 bit icon
64x64 pixels - 1 or 8 bit mask - 1, 4, 8, or 24 bit icon
128x128 pixels - 8 bit mask - 24 bit icon

icns2png currently only extracts the 128x128 8 bit mask and 24 bit icon image

===============================================================================
Requirements

Icon2PNG should be able to run on just about any *nux distribution 

The source is cross-platform - I have successfully built and run it on
PowerPC Linux, x86 Linux, and Mac OS X (UNIX)

===============================================================================
About Icon2PNG - Linux Edition

I wrote Icon2PNG as a Macintosh utility for converting some of my Mac icons to
PNG images so I could edit them with a more powerfull utility, and also to use
them in Linux and put them on websites. I had previously been using Photoshop
to save the PNG images, and another icon editor to extract the 32bit icons
and alpha channel from the new icns format.

After I released Icon2PNG for the Mac, I began to receive several e-mails
requesting a version for Linux. You asked, I delivered. :)

You should be able to get the latest version at http://www.bearca.com/software/