It appears that if there's a 8bit image before a 32bit image it will use the 8bit one.
I tried reordering the images using
@icon sushi and it then picked up the 32bit image. Although that order doesn't work for win98 explorer as it expects the lowest depth for a size to be first, so it shows the 32bit image using the 1bit transparency mask (as opposed to the 8bit alpha channel) which for most of the icons I have wouldn't look good.
I think what I may do is go through my icon collection using
@icon sushi or
IconShop and extract all the 32bit icons for use with TLB.
Aside: those are the best two freeware icon applications for spliting and combining _multiple sized_ icons and ICL's I've found.
Both can save icl libraries and .ico files with multiple sizes/depths in a single icon, and support
32bit icons up to 128x128 (possibly beyond I don't think I have any icons bigger than that).
IconShop is very
good for browsing files (icons/cursors/BMP/GIF/TIFF/XPM/resources/exe/libraries) for icons, particularly because it shows, at once, every image for each size and colour depth an icon has. It's
not as easy to create and save ICL's as it could be because strangely you can't drag and drop from it's own directory view pane, you either have to open several icons/libraries at once from the open dialog or drag and drop them from explorer. It's also
very easy to lose what you're doing because clicking on a file in the directory pane with switch to that file without prompting to save. It was last updated in 2002 so it's probably not under active development.
@icon sushi is
by far the better program, while
not as easy to use for browsing and easier to make mistakes with (it allows you to reorder the images sizes/depths into unrecommended orders, using the blue arrows or Ctrl+up/down arrow keys whereas IconShop takes care of ordering for you), it is clearer as to what size and depths each individual image is. It also has
very helpful keyboard shortcuts, hint: use Ctrl+1, Ctrl+2, Ctrl+3 to switch to the different list views. While it doesn't have functionality to edit the icon itself it does have functionallity to edit the transparency mask and alpha channel. The last beta was out April 3, 2005, so this is definately one to watch.
update it appears that neither can save icl libraries with alpha transparency. I'm not sure if it's a limitation of the applications or the format. The alpha information isn't lost, it just doesn't get picked up when I try to using the icl in tlb.
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