Adding an image (icon/symbol) into the font - database

Is there any way I can add images to the font I'm using?
I've been working on my card game (see link in my profile) and the symbols I use are a part of the language of the game. I want to be able to freely use my icons/symbols in my text to any program I use. Ultimately, I need to create a database and would need to put the text (that includes the icons/symbols) in an area of an app or website.
For the past 4 years, I've gotten away with manually inserting the symbols as pictures and shrinking them, but it's too inflexible for my plans.
The icons/symbols are full color vector images created in either Illustrator or Fireworks CS5 (my wife made them). The color is important as part of the symbol.
Thank you! hewhocomes

You should try font awesome: http://fortawesome.github.io/Font-Awesome/
It is a library of icons easy to use and install and you can change the color of the icons or any other attribute just as you would regular text using: color: #some-color.
I hope this helps.
Good luck!

Related

Searching for a default "check mark" icon

I am currently searching for an icon that shows a green check mark, such as this:
Basically what I want to do is the following: My C# WPF application contains a ListView with some entries and each of the entry gets validated. Depending on the outcome of the validation, such a green check mark or a red cross should be displayed.
I found a very nice red cross in the class SystemIcons. It is called SystemIcons.Error. The SystemIcons class also provides other icons like "Exclamation", "hand", "Shield", "Question" and various other icons, however there is no such a check mark thing.
Does anyone know whether such a check mark icon exists in some default library? I googled but I could not find anything alike. In case there is no such Icon, I would have to take some image from the web (like I posted here), but that would be the last option since my application should look consistent and I'm pretty sure Microsoft uses lots of those green things in many places of Windows. So there must be some icon I could use, right?
Best wishes,
Christian
If you're using one of the full versions of Visual Studio, you could always check out the Visual Studio Image Library that comes with Visual Studio.
I'm double checking now to make sure it contains something like what you're looking for.
What size icon images do you need?
If 16x16 will do then I'd recommend the silk icon set at famfamfam.com. This set is nice and consistent, and contains a green check mark.

Using VS2010 Image Library when image contains more than one icon

I'd like to create a button containing an image (remove) from the VS2010 Image Library in WPF (...\_Common Elements\Actions\remove.png). This image actually contains four versions of the icon in different sizes. How do I go about using the first one of these?
Thanks,
Chris
I think that the files in the _Common Elements are meant to be used when creating or composing new icons, so you don't have to recreate the, well, common elements for each icon. Because of that, whenever I needed one of the icons from this, I just copied the one I needed into a new image and used that.
Read the readme files in the directory you want to use images from. For example it states in _Common Elements\Objects\_MSCommonElements_Objects - Readme.html (rough translation from my German version):
These common elements are supposed to be used during development and design of new custom icons.

How should I use .ico files in a Winforms Application?

I'm developing a WinForms c# 3.0 application. Our designer created quite a lot of .ico files containing all the needed art. The choice of .ico was made because quite often, the same image is needed in several places in different dimensions.
Now, it seems .ico files are really annoying to use in visual studio. The only way to use those images seems to be through images list (which aren't supported by all controls).
Compared to other resources, you can't write this :
foo.Image = global::RFQHUB.RFQHUBClient.Properties.Resources.foo; // Cannot implicitly convert type 'System.Drawing.Icon' to 'System.Drawing.Image'
Here are the options I'm considering :
create ImageLists of all possible sizes referencing all my icons in my main window. Link these ImageLists from other windows and find a way to export Image objects from the ImageList when I can't use it directly ; since ImageList contains a Draw() method, this should probably be possible.
convert all the x.ico I've got in several x16.gif ...x48.gif, and use those through resources.
I'd be interested to know if some people have been successfully using .ico resources in a Winform application. In so, how did you set up things ?
ICO isn't quite an obsolete format, but it's close. It's still useful for your application icon, but for almost everything else, it's better to use an ImageList for each size that you need. And it's much faster to populate an ImageList from a bitmap that contains multiple images layed out in a grid.
You also want to use an Alpha channel transparency in your bitmaps to get the best result, so storing them as .PNG files in your resources is the best way to go, since PNG supports an alpha channel. ICO and GIF files support only single bit for transparency - every pixel is either fully opaque or fully transparent. An 8 bit alpha channel for transparency looks much nicer.
If you can send your artist back to the drawing board then you should do so, and have him/her do full anti-aliased images with alpha. If you can't, then I suggest that you write a small program to convert all of your icon files into bitmaps suitable for loading into ImageLists.
Convert the images into PNG. Point. Whoever decided to use .ico files to start with should get talked to in private - the argument holds no ground.

Get path geometry from image

If i have a logo, let's say done as a jpg or even a png. Any suggestion for how I can use that to define a path geometry? It would be really good if any suggestions could be provided for how i can do it in blend.
Thanks
Yes - I just tackled this problem for an LOB application two days ago.
I can't offer advice for Blend (though I've read that it can be done in Expression Designer). However, the best free tool I've found for this is called InkScape (http://www.inkscape.org).
It's opensource, and while it's intended primarily for editing SVG vector-based images, it has two key features that are useful to us WPFers:
It can vectorize (i.e. "trace") raster images like bitmaps and jpegs, albeit not as well as one would hope, and
It can export the vector image as XAML
You'll invariably find that you get better results from loading vector formats (like SVG, EMF, WMF, etc) and saving to XAML, than if you try to convert a bitmap/jpeg... simply because the process of vectorizing a raster image is error prone at best. So if you want to bring a company logo into XAML, try to get hold of the source files used to create the logo (perhaps done in Illustrator?) and import that into InkScape.
If this post is helpful, please be kind and give it a one-up.
Jasema is a terrific tool right for the job.
Also, don't be shy to use Blend - it is somewhat more difficult to use (drawing shapes using pen) but it gets easier pretty fast. Switch on gridlines and optionally snap to them for good results.
What both Jasema and Blend are lacking, is the ability to easily create shapes with a central symmetry (like stars), so I took parts from Jasema and created my own tool (named Radius) that works a bit like a combination of a ruler and compass.
I have a good idea but you're png, bmp, jpg or other non vector file is must be very simple because we need best scan results and only use inkscape.
Step: Drag and drop your file workspace on Inkscape, download free.
Tip: If your image is color white, Top menu item File->Document Properties-> heck Checkerboard Background and if you want uncheck Page border show.
Step: Top menu item Path-> Trace Bitmap-> Mode check what you want property, i usually use color property and if your file is png check Remove Background then click OK, then wait again Ok button is Enable and close window.
Step: Now you have a two layer, top layer vektor file and bottom layer your file. Select vector file and top menu item Edit-> XML Editor-> select svg path and look side column, d name propery in your data path value.
But this method may not always work or may not give the desired results and draw your own shapes with the scape so you can get the path data from the XML editor.
Example, my first tests this like:
and after working on it some more:
I've solved my problem (export an image as XAML) using Microsoft Expression Design 4 (Free Version). I've downloaded from the link
http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/confirmation.aspx?id=36180
As input, I had Adobe Ilustrator files.
Adobe Illustrator / CorelDraw is perhaps the best tool out there for these operations that I have used.
Personally, I prefer illustrator for on-screen media. These tracings can be exported into several formats such as EPS, SVG, AI, or even XAML (with this plugin)
Best of Luck !!!!
I have recently been struggling with this myself. I had a set of icons done in data and needed to update them to look nicer.
I tried everything, manually typing them out. drawing in svg, converting svg to xaml.
in the end i found a list of open source icons from google material icons.
I then used this to convert from the svg files to data
https://github.com/BerndK/SvgToXaml
It works well but not for the icons i drew myself.
I decided to place all the icons data i convert into an app i built myself that will give you the data and a preview of the icon. feel free to use and contribute. I will keep updating as much as i can.
https://github.com/sgreaves1/XamlIcons
Convert your image from png to svg in online converter, then drop file into this site http://inloop.github.io/svg2android/ and you will see pathData of your image like below shown in my image.

ALT-TAB Application Icon Pixelated

When a child window of my application is opened and I view the ALT+TAB menu, the application icon looks pixellated. I assume that Windows uses a low resolution version of the icon (16x16 pixel I think). What can I do that Windows selects the right version which would be 32x32 pixel?
I assigned an icon to the window in question that has 16x16, 24x24, 32x32, 48x38 and 256x256 in true color. Please note that VS says in the proterties that 32x32 is used and that it works fine for the main window of my application where I assigned the exact same icon.
The caption bar of a Windows application window display icons in 16x16 pixels. The Alt-Tab list, however, shows icons in 32x32 pixels. It uses the same icon as is set for the window. If you only set a 32x32 one, the caption bar has to scale it down, which tends to look ugly as it uses nearest-neighbor interpolation. So how does one support both?
The answer is the ICO file! It supports embedding multiple icons in one file, typically the same (or similar) icon in various sizes and, less commonly, color formats.
Browsers, Windows, and others are typically designed to smartly use the appropriately sized variant within a given ICO file. So the answer is to have an ICO file with both sizes (or more) inside. The result is that the caption bar correctly uses the 16x16 version and Alt-Tab uses the larger 32x32 one.
The methods for saving an ICO file with multiple icons inside varies from program to program. However, GIMP can easily do it (and it's free). The trick is to have your variously-sized icons as separate layers. When you go to save it as an ICO file, GIMP will prompt you with the ability to set the size and color format of each layer. A good tutorial, with images, can be read here.
If anyone has any links or suggestions for creating multi-icon ICO files in other programs, feel free to add them. Also, I'm unsure if the Visual Studio built-in image editor can do it or not — I've rarely bothered with it.
Fixed the problem. I put the icon on the wrong form. As I don't think that this question will be of any help for anybody feel free to delete it.

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