The Mother of All Windows Books/CD-MOM.iso/cd_mom/icons/allicons.doc

Text File | 1992-06-25 | 7KB | 181 lines

                ALL ICONS

                assembled by

            Howard S. Friedman CIS 70720,3022


    This collection of icons was assembled with the assistance of
    Keith Ledbetter's DUPICON utility and Philippe Rabergeau's
    LISTICO version 1 (*not* version 2!).  DUPICON will identify
    and/or delete the duplicates from as many as 3192 icon files in
    a single directory.  Its other limitation is that it will only
    sort icon files of 766 bytes.

    LISTICON will show up to 56 icons per screen, with or without
    the filenames.  It is essential for sorting and identifying icon
    files visually.

    This collection contains over 4184 icons which DUPICON says
    are unique, of which some 19 may be duplicates.  That is, they
    all differ by at least one byte.  As you will readily see by
    examining them, there are innumerable duplicates, which must be
    sorted out by visual inspection.

    I believe this is the largest collection of icons anywhere,
    and I also believe that there are many more out there, many
    of them imbedded in various EXE, COM, DLL, and other files
    in programs that were designed specifically for use with Windows.
    These are difficult to extract, although at least one utility has
    come to my attention that claims to be able to do this.  This is
    Steve Stedman's and Jeff Ayars' ICOMAGIC utility, which not only
    can draw and edit icons, but can extract them from EXE files
    that contain them.

    I have divided the icons into 25 catagories.  Otherwise, it
    would be impossible to sort them out.  I have also renamed
    many of them, particularly those related to one another.
    Note that some Windows program icons are in WINICON, while
    others, e.g., 123 for Windows, Excel, and Norton Desktop for
    Windows, are in SPRDICON and UTILICON, respectively.

    APPLICATIONS -- mostly databases and integrated programs not
            found elsewhere

    CHARACTERS -- mainly cartoon characters

    COMMUNICATIONS -- relating to telephone, LAN, and networks

    COMMUNICATIONS HARDWARE -- modems, phones, etc.

    COMPUTER HARDWARE -- relating to chips, disks, monitors, etc.

    DESK --icons relating to office equipment and tasks

    DOS -- various disk and DOS functions, e.g., COPY, FORMAT, etc.

    FILES --largely files and folders

    FINANCE  -- accounting, etc.

    FLAGS -- of all nations

    GAMES -- a miscellany of icons relating to both computer and
         other games

    GRAPHICS --including drawing, etc.

    IMAGES -- mostly pictures of almost anything, except hardware

    LANGUAGE --icons for programming languages

    MISCELLANEOUS (2) -- everything that I couldn't find another place
             for

    PLAY -- mostly for non-computer games

    SIGNS -- traffic, direction, and other signs

    SYMBOLS -- signs that don't fit in the above category

    SPREADSHEETS -- 1-2-3, Excel, Quattro, etc.

    UTILITY -- for repairing, organizing, scanning, and editing
           drives and diskettes

    WINDOWS -- largely Windows accessory programs not found elsewhere

    WORD -- mainly word processing, printing, and desk top publishing

    WRITING -- forms, notebooks, mail, etc.,

    ZIP -- icons for the compression/decompression utilities

    Icon files take up a lot of room on any disk or drive.  Being
    all about 766 bytes, they require two 512-byte sectors on a
    floppy diskette, and from 2 to 8K on a hard drive.  I therefore
    suggest that you use them sparingly.  That is, once you have
    selected those that you want to use, store the others on a
    diskette or a tape backup, preferably in a compressed format.

    For example, the 182 icon files in the CHARICON.ZIP file take
    138,480 actual bytes, but 372736 bytes on my hard drive, which
    has 2K clusters.  The ZIPped file, on the other hand, takes
    only 61,384 bytes, of which 14,402 are required for the header
    data.  Altogether, the 4184 icons in this file occupy a total
    of 8,437,760 bytes on my hard drive, while the 16 ZIPped files
    require about 1,261,568 bytes

    One of the most difficult tasks in working with this many icon
    files is to get them into a single directory, so that DUPICON
    can examine them.  According to Keith Ledbetter, version 2.0
    of DUPICON will be able to examine up to 10,000 icon files at
    one time, and across directories and drives.  It took more than
    2 hours to unZIP the 25 archived icon files into a single
    directory.  Once they were together, DUPICON 1.0 could not
    examine them.  Norton Commander could not move or copy more
    than about 547 files at a time.  Once a group, e.g., A*.ICO,
    was moved, Norton Commander could not find any more, even if
    there were several hundred more, as long as there were more
    than 550 files in the directory.  DOS, on the other hand, was
    able to do a complete DIR *.ICO.  Using NDOS or 4DOS as the
    command interpreter, MOVE A*.ICO went perfectly, moving all
    ICO files to another directory.

    If you use icons mainly within Windows 3.x, James Curran's
    ICONDLL utility will build DLL files for any number and type
    of icons.  These can then be used when establishing new programs
    within Windows program groups.  The only drawback to DLL icon
    files is that, if you have too mny icons in them, it takes a
    long time to scan through them to select just the proper icon.
    See also the Addendum below.

    For the reasons above, I suggest that, when one is looking for
    an appropriate icon, one selects one of the 25 groups described
    above, unZIP it, and scan it visually with LISTICO, which can
    display up to 56 icons per screen.

    My thanks to the many unkown (to me!) individuals who designed,
    produced, packaged, and uploaded these icon files in various
    formats to innumerable BBS's.

    Enjoy!

    ADDENDUM

    Icons are used mainly for Windows and related programs.
    In this regard one should note that many newer programs for
    Windows provide one or more DLL libraries containing many
    icons.  For example, Direct Access for Windows provides
    a DLL containing over 300 icons.  It provides the further
    facility of adding to or deleting icons from that library.
    Thus one can create a custom DLL file.  The Direct Access
    icon function further lets one import icons directly from
    *.ICO files, or those imbedded within either EXE files or
    other DLL library files.  As noted above, icon files take
    up a lot of space individually, but when they are grouped
    into a DLL file, they take up much less disk space.  For
    example, the 147 icon files in the files APPSICON.ZIP have
    a total of 113,724 bytes, but occupy 602,112 bytes of disk
    space, that is, one 4K cluster on my drive.  The APPSICON.DLL
    file has only 17,232 bytes, and takes up only 131072 bytes of
    disk space.

    James M. Curran's ICONDLL utility can package up to 560 ICO
    files into a single DLL of about 480,000 bytes.  Don't try
    to put more than 560 files into one DLL.  Otherwise you will
    bump up against an error message, which will probably require
    you do to do a cold boot!  Aside from the convenience of
    having a group of ICO files in a single location, DLL files
    have little advantage when it comes to saving space.  In
    fact, above header data of 1472 bytes in each DLL file, each
    additional ICO file requires 832 bytes.  Therefore one must
    weight cluster size (1024, 2048, etc.) against the space
    occupied by the DLL.