Miscellaneous Utilites

bmp2vbm

The utility bmp2vbm converts a Window or OS/2 .bmp format bitmap file into a .vbm Vicon bitmap format file. The .vbm file is then used with a vIcon object definition. The bmp2vbm utility will not convert all .bmp files. Specifically, it can't handle old format .bmp files, nor can it handle compressed .bmp files.

Windows has many tools to generate .bmp files. For X, the widely available tool xv can generate .bmp files from various source formats.

Bmp2vbm is a command line tool - run it from a Unix prompt, or from an MSDOS box on Windows. The command line format is: bmp2vbm inputname outputname iconname. You should specify only the base file names: bmp2vbm will automatically supply the .bmp and .vbm extension. The iconname specifies the name used to generate the date (e.g., iconname_bits).

Other Utilites

The directory v/icons includes over 30 different monochrome icons in .vbm format suitable for building command pane tool bars. Most of these icons were derived from various Windows sources, and I would encourage their use for the standard functions they define. Some of these include creating a new file (new.vbm), opening an existing file (open.vbm), cut, copy, and paste (*.vbm), printing (print.vbm), and so on.

There is a demo program in the v/icons directory that can be compiled and used to see what all the icons look like. All the icons are 16 by 16 bits, and will match standard buttons in height on Windows. The height of standard buttons on X depends on the default system font.

As usual, contributions of other Vicons is more than welcome. I hope to build up the icons directory to several hundred icons.