Hello, Graeme Geldenhuys.

On 28.04.2007 you wrote:

GG> Hi,

GG> For the Editor Toolbar (add-on) package to work correctly (visually
GG> than is), it needs to grab the glyph associated with each registered
GG> action in the IDE. Unfortunately most menu items have no images.  I'm
GG> trying to solve this problem by creating some artwork, but before I
GG> can continue, I need the following information.

GG> Could somebody please confirm the following details. If there is no
GG> standard, can we please decide on one now!

GG> * What is the recommended image format? XPM?  If so, why are there so
GG> many .BMP and .ICO files in the /images directory. Can we get rid of
GG> the foreign image formats and stick to one format only?  XPM seems to
GG> be perfect. It is small, it's made up of text, so can be included in
GG> units directly and supports transparency.

For me it is very difficult to create XPM for every new image I want
to add to lazarus. In windows I should at first create bmp or ico for
that purpose, then I must load my linux, start gimp and there to
convert from original image to xpm. It is not so fast and easy.

I can imagine that XPM is very easy to create for you, since it is widely
supported under linux.

Thats may be the reason that current images are stored in different
formats.

OTOH BMP, ICO and XPM support only mask (so they are not true 32 bpp
formats). And why not to use modern and widely used PNG format?
PNG is supported by most of modern editors and it is possible to
find big free image libraries in PNG. So maybe this format can be used
as prefered. But I dont know can lazarus use png images or this is
unimplemented?

GG> * What are the standard sizes for the IDE images? For example the menu
GG> images are *not* consistent in size at all!!  Looking at most images I
GG> came to the following conclusions.

GG>   Palette Bar (component) images:  23x23

Should be 24x24 to be compatiable with delphi and thus to prevent
component developers of rebuilding their images (made for delphi).

GG>   Menu images:  16x16
GG>   Button images (next to palette bar): 16x16
GG>   Treeview images (CodeExplorer): 16x16
GG>   Property Editors/Designer images: 16x16

GG>   ... are there any other images I missed?


GG> * Howmany glyphs are supposed to be in each image file?

GG>   single image:
GG>       Palette Bar (component) images
GG>       Treeview images  (CodeExplorer)

GG>   two images (enabled and disabled):
GG>       Menu images
GG>       Button images (next to palette bar)
GG>       Property Editors/Designer images


GG> General Suggestions:
GG> * Can we standardise the same actions with the same images. For
GG> example: Why is the Save menu item got a different image to the Save
GG> button on the Palette Bar (next to components)?

I had today same minds.

Maybe we can create:
 - one imagelist 16x16
 - one imagelist 24x24
 - one imagelist ...

And then define somewhere constants with imageindexes. This also should help
lazarus to eat less memory and gdi resources (at least soon when our TImageList
become native).

-- 
Best regards,
 Paul Ishenin                          mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]


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