Thread: Icon with transparent background (example: restaurant)

Sounds quite interesting, may I ask which tool you used to create the icon?

Originally Posted by gpuser

Sounds quite interesting, may I ask which tool you used to create the icon?

Er, no - I don't remember!

Seriously, I'm no good at creating any artwork, but have quite often edited existing ones. When working on a small picture such as an icon I use any tool which works on single pixels, at a scale where I see a grid of small squares, one square per pixel. You click on a square to toggle it between foreground and background colour, and can drag an eraser tool to wipe unwanted pixels to background. For TomTom icons, a pure red (255,0,0) background displays as transparent.

In the case of the transparent crossed knife and fork, which I did quite a long time ago and don't remember the details, I would have used either Windows Paint or, more probably, open-source GIMP. It's a very simple job, any single-pixel editor will do. I started with an icon for TomTom which would have had an opaque white background and black border; I got it from one of the many collections of TomTom icons. I zoomed to a scale which showed individual pixels, erased all the pixels of the black border, and used a fill tool to change the background from white to pure red. I think the knife and fork were blue, which I found showed up unobtrusively on the map; I might have changed the colour from black to blue, I don't remember. The point really is that I have zero artistic skill, zero expertise with graphics software.

I described this as a useful technique; if anyone is interested in the actual icon (crossed blue knife and fork, transparent background; can be seen on a map if you are aware of it, but is not obtrusive), I'll upload it.

By the way, I asked about changing the built-in POI icons that show for POIs in POI.DAT; I've never found any answer to that. But it seems that the place to look is in the TomTom program files ("TomTom Navigator.exe", possibly data.chk), not POI.DAT itself, because the icons do not change from map to map.