[Pythonmac-SIG] Question about Pil and icns...

[Bob Ippolito]

On Dec 22, 2004, at 7:09 PM, whamoo wrote:

> I've read that new beta of the Pil now add support for icns file 
> format, nice, but in the code of the plugin i read that there is only 
> the read support, so, i cannot convert icns in other format and 
> vice-versa? And if i load icns, work on it, then i cannot save.....
> Can someone tell me something about it? Someone have tried?

That is correct, this is read-only support.  You may not save icns 
files with the code in PIL.  You could of course do it the native way, 
using Mac APIs, or just by dragging images into Icon Composer.

My use case was that I had application resources in the canonical Mac 
OS X formats, and I wanted to re-use them in a Windows port of the 
software... so I wrote an icns decoder for these files (I used the 
128x128 version of the icon in the UI), and all the string localization 
support from Foundation.

I did of course need regular windows .ico files for the applications, 
but typically they only go up to 48x48, so I still wanted to re-use my 
.icns file rather than maintain a separate png of 128x128 for the UI.  
Needless to say, I did not need write support for ico, since all of my 
source icons were in icns format.  What I would've liked is Windows XP 
.ico writing support, but I couldn't find that (or sufficient docs to 
implement it) *anywhere* and I ended up using a commercial package on 
Win32 to do it in batch.

-bob