Re: Graphic converter query - transparency

Woody <usenet@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Rowland McDonnell <real-address-in-sig@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Woody <usenet@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Rowland McDonnell <real-address-in-sig@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Woody <usenet@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
[snip]

I dunno - I recall icons with transparent (missing, more like) bits
under < OS X, so why can't I have 'em with OS X?

Well, you can, but that isn't what the finder uses for transparent
images (I don't think).

Well, with ResEdit, you could define a mask to blank off regions of the
icon square that you didn't want to count as `part of the icon'.

You could. Back in the pre osx days, icons were 32x32 in 8 bit with a 1
bit transparency. I assume that OSX can still cope with those, but they
do look odd.

They look normal to me. OS X icons just don't have the same screen
presence.

Sometimes, this mask was used in an annoying fashion so that the icon
had holes in it thus making it hard to click.

Some icons were more annoying than others - especially really thin ones
where you double clicked them and nothing happened as you got a gap.

Never mind the thin ones - there were some with holes in. Take
something like a Polo mint and have the centre masked out to be
inactive. Now that's *really* annoying. I never had any trouble
hitting the thin ones - but I did have trouble with holes.

Sounds like `equivalent to transparency' to me - and one would assume,
in a sensible world, that the Finder would interpret transparent parts
of an image given to it to use as an icon as `masked off bits' in that
fashion.

Having a look now, if you click the tool in the toolbox that looks like
a T crossed out that is on the right, 3 up from the bottom (this is
version 6 - I guess it is old, it isn't something I use), you can click
on a colour and all of that colour becomes transparent.

Ah - yes, so it does. So why couldn't I find that mentioned in the
manual? Hmm...

Don't know. I found it in the manual.
I couldn't see anything in the area of the menus I expected to see it,
so I typed 'transpa' in the manual and found it.

I typed `transparency', and didn't.

It actually told me the tool was in a different place (it said 2 up),
but once I knew it was there it was easy enough to find it (not that the
icon said 'transparency' in my head).

Such icons all need to be learnt: most of them don't make proper sense.

It was on page 149 of the 'hagens' manual, whatever that was. Actually
that was an odd thing looking at the manuals. I just wanted the manual,
but the first option was 'Open hagens manual'.

I've only got the demo of the manual, whatever that means.

the other way is to copy the part that isn't white and paste it into a
new transparency.

Okay, I need to learn what that means. I've STFW and got horribly
confused. Anyone got a pointer to a site I could read that'd teach me
what I need to know to understand this?

What I meant is that if you have a large area around the outside of an
image that is white, if you select everything that isn't white (ie, the
rest of the image) and copy it, you could paste it in a new transparent
image.

Uhuh - damned awkward to do in practice, though, isn't it? I don't see
how I could do that job competently and I have tried using the lasso
tool.

Depends on the image - some images are easy, some not using the 'magic
wand' type tool.

The magic wand? I've never got any use out of that tool. It functions
as advertised as far as I can tell, but it's not a useful function as
far as I'm concerned.

I don't tend to have custom icons but I reinstalled my wifes macbook to
try and cure the wifi issues (it didn't) and she has them all over the
palace

All over the palace, eh? Moved up the property ladder, then?

Wish we had, then we would have all the chavs falling into the moat
outside!

Not much correlation between `palace' and `moat'.

For example:

<http://www.royal.gov.uk/output/page555.asp>: without moat.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Headstone_Manor>: with moat.

(Headstone manor is between my home and the infants/middle schools I
went to when I was young. Not that I walked past it every day, what
with the actual walking route not being through the park the manor lives
in.)

<http://www.eng-h.gov.uk/archrev/rev95_6/headston.htm>

Icons should be 128x128 32 bit argb (or is it rgba)?

Dunno what that means at all.

128 pixels square, with 8 bits used for red, green, blue and an alpha
channel.

Ah - righto. Now to find out what an alpha channel is.

It is an 8 bit channel covering transparency level, where full alpha
(255 or in OSXs terms, 1.0) is completely opaque, 0 is completely
transparent, and all the values in between are a varying amount of
transparency.

Uhuh. Ta.

You can do it in photoshop so I am
sure you can do it in graphic converter

I'm confused. You seem to be telling me to use some special tool called
icon tool or icon composer (which I don't have) and also Photoshop or
Graphic Converter.

No, I said I did it in either icon composer (which you don't have)

I think I might well install the developer tools one of these days. But
I've got a lot of setting up to do yet. Just got MacTeX 2007 installed
and customised to my spec and my head hurts as it usually does when I do
that job.

I almost downloaded TeX at one point but I looked and it was huge - many
hundreds of meg

TeX isn't that big. That's a full TeX distribution. A basic LaTeX
distribution - essentially, TeX with the minimum extras - can be put on
a handful of floppy discs (I think the smallest I've seen is two
floppies).

Even a full TeX distribution takes up less space than MS Office, and it
makes much more efficient use of CPU and RAM.

and it was the first time I had got close to my download
limit so I didn't.
Truth to tell I have no need for it, especially as I am one assignment
away from finishing my Open University degree!

<shrug> Need? The main point of tools on computers is to make life
easier. LaTeX makes some jobs easier. If you don't have such jobs to
do, or can't be bothered to make your life easier, then you've made the
right decision.

I use LaTeX because it's quicker and higher quality than anything else I
could possibly have access to; and because the file format's got better
long-term prospects than pretty much anything else (XML promises to be
better - but we shall have to see, won't we?)

Another point is that if you want access to fancy typography, XeTeX is
one of the easier ways of doing it on Macs as far as I can tell for all
that it's completely anti-wysiwyg and generally `not the Mac way at
all'. At least it works properly (more or less), which is more than you
can say for the Apple-supplied fancy typography tools I've looked at.

If you don't care about that, but want access to high quality
typesetting, you only have two choices: TeX (any flavour) and InDesign -
those two are in the same league as each other, and nothing else
available comes close. InDesign takes more space on disc, takes more
CPU, and costs infinitely more ('cos TeX's free).

(Letraset once produced DTP software that used a paragraph building
algorithm that was an improved TeX algorithm - designed by a chap called
Zapf (yes, that one), based on Knuth's work ('cos Zapf worked with Knuth
- mostly to help him with fount design). But it's long gone.)

or
photoshop.

which I can't afford and have almost no use for.

Its an advantage when work pay for these things.

Aye.

However, I was guessing you could do it in graphic converter as well. I
didn't know, as it is not something I use.
However, I just did and it works. This is what I did.

In graphic converter I made an image of 128 x 128 with a transparent
background. I made my image (just a rubbish image as a test).
I then saved it as a tiff.
I then got info on the tiff, selected the image at the top left and
copied it. I then got info on a folder and selected the top left icon
and said paste.
The folder now has the custom icon.

That method worked okay here. So now I have nonpariel-32e with a
scanned in image of my real HP-32E calculator as its icon.

<heh> Four RPN calculators on DragThing (and another couple on
Dashboard). And yes that does make some sort of sense. One of them's
arbitrary precision, one of them's got a very nice UI so it's very nice
to use (via app or widget), one of them's a clone of the real pocket
calculator I've been using for the last 30-odd years, and the other two?
One of them's a clone of a *powerful* HP calculator, and the other's a
very space efficient widget with a rolling stack display that ought to
be useful but isn't as handy as I thought.

I guess you calculate more than me!

I do mental arithmetic every time I go shopping (to check the change if
nothing else). I sometimes need to do arithmetic when sat at my desk.

But regardless of that, I take the line that I'm damned well going to
have a convenient way of doing bloody arithmetic if I've got a
stonkingly hugely powerful computer sat under my desk - a matter of
principle, you might say.

I mean, what would I say to the shade of Charles Babbage if he found I
had a computer that didn't enable me to do arithmetic, eh?

And anyway, I reckon it's dead cool to have such a good clone of a
classic HP calculator on my Mac, so there. My little[1] brothers will
be mildly entertained/impressed if he ever gets to see it.

I just have the basic calculator on OSX, and two real casio calculators.
One is good on various base functions and everything else but lacks
natural logarithms, and is programable which you can't take into OU
exams, and the otherone isn't doesn't and isn't, and I can!

I've been using RPN since before I started high school. I find it hard
to use calculators with an `=' button.

Oh yes, I have a basic calculator with really big display and buttons
which I use on shows to the public with my wifes shop.

For adding up the bill, yes?

Still, I tend to grab the real calculator any time I need to do a bit of
arithmetic. It's a lot quicker to use.

Thing is, that's what Mac Help appears to tell me to do.

Ahh.. never read that!

<shrug> What else can one do?

Play around with it until it works generally.

I've tried that with Graphic Converter for many many years and you know
what? I can't get it to work as I want.

Same here, which is probably one of the reasons I never use graphic
converter. In fact I greatly dislike it.

But what else is there?

FWIW, it does the job of converting between formats very nicely, thanks.

Rowland.

[1] I'm just about 5'10". They're both younger than me and tower over
me so I call 'em little bros at every available opportunity.


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