Anthony's Icon Library
                      -------------------------
               Color Formats Available and Formats Used.
               -----------------------------------------

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 collect them all together and re-publish the PbmPlus package.

This allows users to easily convert icons from one format into
another format easily, 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 interchangeably. 

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 archives, look for
`ppmtoxpm' in the archie database.


X Pixmap Format (xpm) :-

The X Pixmap format is quite compact, and they can be easily 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 background tiling patterns are useless.

Xpm's however do have a `transparent color' built into it. Also in the
past, it has had many `incompatible' revisions. UPDATE: the latest Xpm
library understands both the new and the old formats directly.
Some sites however (particularly some old motif distributions) do not
understand the new pixmap format.

Recently two programs have become available to allow you to easily edit
these icons.  And a long time coming they were too. These are "pixmap",
by Lionel Mallet, which can handle the transparent color.  The other is
"xpaint", by David Koblas, koblas@netcom.com. This program has very good
with excellent 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.

The main problem has been that until recently you couldn't use X pixmaps
to set the root background pattern. The "xloadimage" program now
supports the use of a filter (like xpmtoppm from pbmplus) to convert X
pixmaps to a format it does understand. Also the latest release of "xv"
now understands the X pixmap format directly.


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 formatted using the X
Pixmap format version 3.4a.

Background Color images were formatted in the GIF format until this
release, and are now stored as X pixmaps. The Color Textures are however
still in their GIF format as these are large in size and contain lots of
different colors. They do not follow the standard color table of the rest
of the library, so use at your own risk of color table problems.


  Anthony Thyssen (SysProg @ Griffith University)  Anthony.Thyssen@gmail.com
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
    Any smoothly functioning technology
             will have the appearance of magic.    - Arthur C. Clarke
------------------------------------------------------------------------------