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Important: The information in this document is obsolete and should not be used for new development.

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Inside Macintosh: More Macintosh Toolbox /
Chapter 5 - Icon Utilities


About the Icon Utilities

The Icon Utilities allow your application (and system software) to manipulate and draw icons of any standard resource type in windows and if necessary in menus or dialog boxes. You need to use these routines only if you wish to draw icons in your application's windows or to draw icons whose resource types are not recognized by the Menu Manager and Dialog Manager in menus and dialog boxes.

To display an icon most effectively at a variety of sizes and bit depths, you should provide an icon family. You can then draw the appropriate member of the family for a given size and bit depth either by passing the family's resource ID to an Icon Utilities routine or by reading the family's icon resources into memory as an icon suite and passing the suite's handle to Icon Utilities routines.

The next section, "Using the Icon Utilities," begins by describing how to draw icons in an icon family. After a brief overview of icon families, icon suites, icon caches, and related Icon Utilities routines, it describes in detail how to

You can use also Icon Utilities routines to

For detailed descriptions of all Icon Utilities routines, including those used to perform these tasks, see "Icon Utilities Reference" beginning on page 5-17.

In addition to the resource types described earlier in this chapter, some Icon Utilities routines operate on icons of resource types 'icm#', 'icm4', and 'icm8'. These mini icons are 12-by-16 pixel icons. Like the icons in an icon family, the three resource types for mini icons identify the icon list, 4-bit color icons, and 8-bit color icons, respectively.


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© Apple Computer, Inc.
6 JUL 1996