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MegaDisc 02 (1987)(MegaDisc Digital Publishing)(AU)[WB].zip
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MegaDisc 02 (1987)(MegaDisc Digital Publishing)(AU)[WB].adf
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ARTICLES
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UsingIcons
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1987-04-21
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MORE ON USING ICONS
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This is the second article in a series on using icons, designed
to take some of the mystery out of manipulating the WorkBench for your
own ends. Apart from saving you time and effort, fiddling with icons can
be fun, and you can customize your discs as you like. You'll notice that
on MEGADISC we've done a lot of that, and it's the equivalent of having
a zappy design for a paper magazine.
ZAPICON
You'll notice the icon title on the main screen of MEGADISC - this
is an empty icon, meaning that it's not attached to any file at all, and
is only there for effect, and, well, to be different. In the Fish Disks
(see SUBS&EXTRAS) you'll find a little utility called "ZAPICON" which was
responsible for the title, in combination with the ICONMERGE utility on
EXTRAS 1.2 (which you should have by now - see article on System 1.2).
To use it, you have to be in the CLI, and you have to have a "brush"
ready, made in DPaint and saved to an appropriate directory. This can be
practically any size, but of course it eventually has to fit into a
window on Workbench. I'd also suggest that when you're designing your
icon in your paint program, you should do it in medium resolution (the
resolution of the Workbench), and that you choose colours spread through
your colour palette - Workbench only allows for 4 colours, and will do
the best it can to approximate the colours you use depending on their
position in the palette.
ZAPICON attaches brushes to programs or "tools", and not to
drawers or projects or discs (though there's a way around this - see
later). So if you have a Tool without an icon (so that it's only
available through the CLI - say TICON) and you want to be able to see it,
and maybe use it, through Workbench, you can use ZAPICON as follows:
> Zapicon Brushname Toolname
e.g. > Zapicon Mybrush Ticon
This will attach the brush to the tool as its icon, as
"Ticon.info" in this case. All icons are represented in the CLI as
".info" files.
It may be that you only want a title like the MEGADISC title.
In this case, while in the CLI, simply delete the program file that
you attached the brush to, and you'll be left with the icon only. In this
example
> delete ticon
Note: only do this with a copy of your program, or Ciao program.
ICONMERGE
You may want to go a bit further and use the IconMerge utility
on your EXTRAS 1.2 disc to attach another icon to the first, or any other
icon for that matter. This is a simple operation of opening the ICONMERGE
icon: you'll see a requestor asking you for the name of the first icon,
i.e., the way the icon will look without being selected. Type in its name
without ".info" (remembering to give the PATHNAME, i.e. the full name of
the directory it's in, like df1:mydrawer/ticon ), and do the same
with the second icon, which of course has to be of the same type, say a
drawer or project or program. The second icon should also be the same
size as the first icon or you'll get an overlapping mess. Then just give
the combined thing a name, which could be the name you started with if
you want to keep it. And that's it. You'll now have an icon which changes
into something else as soon as you select it or open it.
GETTING AROUND THE ICON-TYPE RESTRICTION
Every time you use the Icon Editor, you'll find a reminder
which tells you that you should "import" or load the same sort of icon
as the file you're going to save it to. And so you should. But if there's
a project icon which you'd really like to attach to a drawer, you can do
it as follows: load in the drawer icon through the "Load data" item in
the menu - it will appear in the first box and in the window; select
a different icon box with the mouse and then load in the icon you want
to attach to the drawer; re-select the drawer so it appears in the edit
window and then "rub" it out or select "clear this frame" from the
menu, and it will vanish; now re-select your desired icon and then
from the menu, "merge with frame" and move your pointer to the "1",
meaning the original box with the drawer now obliterated. Release the
mouse button and you should have the required icon now passing as a
drawer icon. Now just select "save data" from the menu, remembering to
type in the whole PATHNAME of the file you want to attach it to.
The icon editor has many capabilities, and is worth playing
around with - you can merge any box with any other to get very odd effects
and you can experiment with the various forms of "highlighting"
available (jam, complement,etc), as well as writing into the frame, and
other possibilities.
It's worth attaching icons to certain drawers and other files
in the CLI which otherwise don't appear on the WorkBench,as it serves
as an immediate reminder of what you've got on your disc. So for example,
if you've got a text file (typed in ED in the CLI - see article on CLI -
or gathered from a public domain disc) which lives only in the CLI, and
which you'd like to access instantly from WorkBench, you can attach an
icon to it by simply loading the right kind of icon (from anything on the
WorkBench - in this case, being a text file, a "project" icon of any kind)
into the Icon Editor and then immediately saving the icon to the name
of the file requiring an icon. Then to be able to read it by simply
double-clicking on it, you have to import the right utility - TICON on
MEGADISC is fine for these purposes, so get into the root directory of
MEGADISC in the CLI and copy TICON to your disc:
> cd MEGADISC2:
> copy TICON to MYDISC:
Now, to ensure that when you double-click your textfile icon, it is
printed onscreen, open "INFO" in the WorkBench Project menu (having
clicked once on your icon) and click in the DEFAULT TOOL box and type
in :TICON then click on SAVE in the bottom left corner. Now when
you open your icon it will call to TICON which will display it onscreen
in the same way as the MEGADISC file appear.
A final note - if you'd like us to put together a disc with any
and all information on icons, including some interesting icons to use,
write and tell us and we'll do so.
END OF "USINGICONS"
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