Re: Making Icons

[Patricia M Godfrey pmgodfrey@xxxxxxxx]

Someone asked how this can be done. This is very much a quick and dirty
procedure, but you don't have to buy any additional software. Here goes:
Open Paint. (Paint is an applet--a mini application--that is part of
Windows. To find it, choose Start-->Programs-->Applications. It's usually
toward the bottom of the list.) Click on Image on the top bar, then
choose Attributes. Set the width and height to 32 each and the units to
pixels. Click OK. Now go to View on the top bar and choose Zoom from the
drop-down menu. Choose Custom, select 800%, and click OK. Choose
View-->Zoom again, and this time the Show Grid option should be visible.
Click on it. You will now have a square marked out into tiny
squares--like a piece of graph paper--and a small pencil for a cursor. At
the bottom is a box showing various colors. Click on the one you want to
use, then position the pencil cursor in each box you want to be that
color and click. If you get color in the wrong box, click on white and
overwrite the erroneous color with white. (It's a good idea to wait till
you've colored all the boxes you want colored, then go back and
white-out. Otherwise, you're switching colors back and forth, which is a
nuisance.) Change colors by first clicking on the desired color in the
box. When you've finished, click file-->Save as, as in any Windows app,
and save the resulting .BMP file.
	Close Paint, right click on your shortcut icon, chose Properties, and
dig down to find the option Change Icon. Browse to the folder where you
saved the .BMP file you created, and select it. As I said in my original
post, the colors sometimes fight with the background of your desktop and
don't come out right, and I have no idea why.
I got this from a very useful pair of books, Windows 95 Secrets
and Windows 98 Secrets, by Brian Linvingston and Davis Straub (IDG
Books).
Patricia