Torsten Bronger
27th September 2002 02:23 UTC

OT: Icon creation
After playing around a bit, and some internet research I'm still lost regarding this.

I have here Corel Photoshop 6, Gimp, and all graphics tools that you can expect on a modern Linux distribution. But:

How can I create an .ico file for NSIS? So far, I've only icons without transparency and fixed palette, and I had to create them pixel by pixel:-(. Since the Gimp writes 8-bit only, png2ico doesn't help. (NSIS wants 4bit.)

Transparency would be great, quantisised palette very nice, and Linux tools prefered.

Yathosho
27th September 2002 22:04 UTC

i dont use gimp, but i doubt you cant limit the palette to 256 colors.

well, if thats true try the following, save you icon as gif (256 colors max) and then open the gif and save it as icon.

otherwise check the documentation again, i really can't imagine you cant change the palette. in photoshop it's under Image>Mode, maybe Gimp uses a similiar interface.

Torsten Bronger
28th September 2002 01:50 UTC

Well, you can limit the palette to whatever you want, but the Gimp doesn't *write* 4-bit pngs, it always promotes them to 8-bit.

My previous way was Gimp --> Corel Photoshop --> .ico, but without transparency and with fixed colours. And even here I had to change many pixels by hand.

Now I used Iconforge to get it at least transparent. But 1) Iconforge is Windows-only (not a real problem) 2) it's shareware and 3) actually way too much.

A simple command line converter would be enough.

Of course, the nicest solution would be if NSIS supported 8-bit icons. ;-)

Yathosho
28th September 2002 02:26 UTC

oh, you should check NSIS 2.0a7, this one supports icon palettes up to 24 bit!

since most icons for nsis 2.0 are 8-bit, i misunderstood you.. and i already forgot nsis 1.x ;)

Yathosho
28th September 2002 02:29 UTC

Well, you can limit the palette to whatever you want, but the Gimp doesn't *write* 4-bit pngs, it always promotes them to 8-bit.