glyphs

Editing The Bat! Glyphs By Tony Boom

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	The best way I have found to modify the glyphs file is to use Paint shop Pro and to cut images from other applications and then paste them into an existing glyph.bmp. You can download a zipped copy of the original images here. Remembering of course copyright rules. It shouldn't matter if it's just for your personal amusement though. Although the information given here relates to PSP, you could apply it to any other image manipultion software like Adobe Photo Deluxe or The Gimp
	First of all, open PSP and then open the standard glyph.bmp. Decide what glyph you're going to modify. This demo will guide you through changing the Check Mail icon from which is the standard Bat! icon to ... the Check Mail icon from elsewhere. The application you're grabbing the icon from should also be running.
	In PSP, open the Capture menu and choose Setup. Set up the options to capture an Area with F11 as the hot key. Then from the same menu, choose Capture. PSP will then automatically minimize to the task bar leaving your desktop with any other running applications in view.
	When you hit the F11 a cross hair will appear. Position this just to the top left of the Check Mail icon you want to capture. When you click the left mouse button you will be able to drag a square around the icon. There will also be a pixel count of the size of the object you're grabbing. As soon as you click the left button again, PSP will maximize itself and you will have a new image of whatever you've just grabbed.
	A side by side comparison of The Bat's icon and the new icon could easily show that the new icon is too large for use in The Bat! so it will need resizing. To do this, make sure the new image has focus, click the Image menu and choose resize. Check the radio button that says "Percentage of the original" and, in the case of Eudora icons for example, I used 75%.
	This should make the new icon the correct size. Then you just use CTRL-C to copy this icon to the clipboard. Click the glyphs.bmp image so that it has focus and use CTRL-E to paste the new icon in. It will automatically be selected for you to use the mouse to move and position it over the icon you wish to replace.
	It is quite possible the background colour will be different from the existing glyph background You just need to set the background colour in PSP to match the original glyph background and use either PSP's replace brush or the normal painting brush to paint over the background. Of course, if you want the icons to have a different coloured background then you can.
	Another thing to remember is that the whole glyphs image file is like a big grid. Each icon needs to be placed centrally in its own square on this grid otherwise they may not be aligned or they may even be part missing when TB uses them
	That's about it. Save the glyph.bmp file to The Bat directory, reboot TB! and see what it looks like. If you want to create an icon from scratch rather than just grabbing it from somewhere else then just create a new file 25x25 pixels square. You could even create it in a dedicated icon editing program like Icon Edit and then copy and paste it into the glyphs.bmp as described above. Have fun.
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