I should probably start with the disclaimer that the following instructions are for Windows only. You can probably modify them to work under some sort of Unix, but I'm not going to, since I figure that if you're smart enough to run Unix, you're smart enough to figure this stuff out.
So, here's my example code. You'll need to download and install
pilrc. (Check the Downloads page.) I've chosen to put it in a
pilrc subdirectory. You'll also need some bitmaps.
The small ones should be 10x9, and the large ones should be 20x18.
If you have a program like Photoshop, you should convert your
images to 8-bit colour, and use this colour
table so that Photoshop can handle all the dithering, instead
of letting PilRC do it. (PilRC does a fair job, but it's not
going to be as good as a program which was designed to do exactly
that.) I've got some sample images which you should download and
save into an images subdirectory.
Okay, so now we have our PilRC, and our images, and it's time to
write the file that ties them all together. Here's mine, which
I've named icons.rcp, with some explanation
afterwards.
/** * Icons. **/ BITMAPFAMILYEX ID 1 BEGIN BITMAP "images/AgentSmithSmallGrey.bmp" BPP 4 BITMAP "images/AgentSmithSmallColour.bmp" BPP 8 BITMAP "images/AgentSmithLargeColour.bmp" BPP 8 DENSITY 2 END
So, What's there to explain. The first three lines are comments.
The next 6 define a family of bitmaps. Large bitmaps have to have
DENSITY 2 at the end. BPP 4 means that
there are four bits of colour information per pixel, which in
Palm-land means it's a greyscale image. BPP 8 means
that there are 8 bits of colour information per pixel, which in
Palm-land means that it's an indexed colour image. If you wanted
to add more images, you would repeat the whole
BITMAPFAMILYEX block, with a different
ID. One thing to watch out for is ids that are
greater than 10,000 or so. They can interfere with some standard
Palm bitmaps. As long as you start your ids at 1, and work your
way up, you shouldn't have any problems.
The final piece of the puzzle is how to turn the images and the
icons.rcp file into something that you can install on
your Palm. I've written a batch file, called
icons.bat to automate much of the work for me. And
here it is.
pilrc\pilrc -ro -type Rsrc -creator Actn -name "New Icons" icons.rcp copy /Y icons.ro icons.prc
Does it need any explanation? I don't think so, but if you feel I'm wrong, please email me, and I'll throw some more information up here.
Oh, I'll be adding more icons to the file as I convert them. You can get a copy of the latest version here. And I wanted to mention that the reason I'm doing this in the first place is to get people to think about the hi-res and lo-res icons differently. There's no reason they have to be the same as each other. When I create galleries of digital pictures on the web, I usually take an interesting snippet from the picture to use as a thumbnail. The people who created the Ravenswood Manor icons which I'm using as a base for the rest of the icons in my pack had the same idea. The lo-res icons are a close-up detail of part of the hi-res icons. You can get a good idea of which icon it is from the lo-res, and see the full picture in the hi-res. Personally, I'ld love to see more icon creators do things like this, but I realize that it takes a lot more time, and so it's unlikely to happen.