Wimp Icons - The many forms they can take...

Hiya,

I recently went through the many different forms that the RISC OS Wimp Icons can take, based on the different flags that are set within them. Although there is some documentation in the PRM and elsewhere, it’s not complete and it doesn’t really help you understand which flags to set. Of course, it doesn’t matter that much if you’re using a template editor, because you just click the buttons until you get the icon you want.

But sometimes you just want to know what your options are – especially when it comes to those pesky text+sprite icons.

So I wrote some example code and I’ve posted it up on my examples repository – https://github.com/gerph/riscos-examples/tree/master/desktop

This isn’t comprehensive, as there are some options that I’ve not included examples for (the coloured border validations and the line spacing spring to mind immediately), but if there’s something I’ve missed in there a pull request or updated tool is always nice.

And as usual, if you’ve got anything else you think is interesting as an example use of RISC OS interfaces, feel free to offer a pull request on the repository.

Text alignments, colours and borders

Sprite alignments

Text+Sprite alignments

Multi-line alignments (RISC OS Classic)

Multi-line unfilled (RISC OS Classic)

There are slight differences in the multi-line output on RISC OS Pyromaniac, which supports the alignment on multi-line icons.

For me, the most quirky combination of flags has always been the one used for labels put on top of bordered sections of dialog boxes, where only text background is filled, not the whole icon. Ah, and you have to give the text an extra leading and trailing space so that the underlying borders do not reach the right up to the text.

Yeah, the ones labelled B STHV on the first page. Those are kinda odd, especially as you have to set the Sprite flag on the Text+Indirected icon, but then not use a sprite. And because there’s a real use for that in labelling those group boxes (well, kinda… you could argue that that’s a use that comes about because the quirk was handy) they have to keep working like that.