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README for libicns 0.9.0 - October 31, 2016
© 2001-2012 Mathew Eis <[email protected]>
© 2014,2016 Kornel Lesiński

Other individuals have supported the development of libicns; they are credited
in the source files where their respective contibutions have been made.

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This library is free software; you can redistribute it and/or
modify it under the terms of the GNU Lesser General Public
License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either
version 2.1 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
Lesser General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU Lesser General Public
License along with this library; if not, write to the
Free Software Foundation, Inc., 51 Franklin Street, Fifth Floor,
Boston, MA 02110-1301, USA.

===============================================================================
This package include the following libraries and utilities:
1) libicns - A library for the translation of the icns format
2) icns2png - A utility for converting icns files into png images
3) icontainer2icns - A utility for extracting icns files from icontainer packs

You should be able to get the latest version at http://sf.net/projects/icns

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libicns is a library for manipulation of the Mac OS icns resource format, also
known as the IconFamily resource type. It can read and write files from the
Mac OS X icns format, as well as read from Mac OS resource files and macbinary
encoded Mac OS resource forks.

As of release 0.5.9, it can fully manipulate any 128x128 and smaller 32-bit
icons, and has partial support for manipulating 8-bit, 4-bit, and 1-bit icons.

When linked with Jasper, it also has full support for 256x256 and 512x512
icon sizes within the icon family.

As of release 0.8.0, it can read the PNG format introduced with OS X Lion 10.7


Please see DEVNOTES for more information on how to use libicns

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Using icns2png

icns2png -x OmniWeb.icns
Converting OmniWeb.icns to OmniWeb_128x128x32.png...

This will result in a file OmniWeb_128x128x32.png with a 128x128 icon from OmniWeb.icns.

Run icns2png --help for more detailed information.

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Using icontainer2icns

icontainer2icns foo.icontainer

This will end up with a couple of icns files identified by the iContainer ID
and the iContainer name in a (new) folder carrying the icontainer name
(without any suffix)

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NOTICE: icontainer2icns is NOT related to www.iconfactory.com - though it
decodes this library type. They are NOT involved, please don't bother them
with bug reports.

For bug/wishes regarding icontainer2icns mailto: [email protected]

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Understanding the Mac OS X Icons

Mac OS X Icon files come in two formats - icns files, and icns resources
embedded with rsrc files. They may also be stored in a macbinary encoded
rsrc files, or applesingle/appledouble encoded rsrc files

libicns (and icns2png) can decode all five storage formats

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://interfacelift.com/icons-mac/ are compressed in .sit files.
These files can be uncompressed using Aladdin Stuffit Expander for Linux,
which can be obtained from http://www.stuffit.com/unix/index.html

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 icns2png 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