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One way to create your own custom *.ico files

by jason.stanford@pobox.com last modified 2007-01-23 20:33

Using a few fairly common utilities, one can create custom icon files to use with PyKotIcon. This method uses the command line.

Via DarwinPorts, or any other method, you'll need the following:

Requires ImageMagick
Requires netpbm

(How to do this is beyond the scope of this article.)

  1. Create your icon in any graphics application, for example Photoshop.
    1. Make it square, such as 128x128 pixels at 72ppi, RGB colorspace.
    2. A solid-color background seems to work best.
    3. Save as a TIFF file, no compression, no transparency.
  2. Using Terminal.app, on the command line, navigate to the folder where you saved the TIFF file(s)
  3. The following command will create a windows icon (*.ico) file compatible with pykoticon
    1. convert icon.tif pnm:- | pnmquant 256 | ppmtowinicon -output pykoticon-green.ico
    2. You can also make a pykoticon-red.ico if you wish, but at the moment pykoticon only uses the green one.
  4. Copy pykoticon-green.ico to the appropriate folder
    1. Example: /Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.4/share/pykoticon/
  5. (Re)Start pykoticon as needed.

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