Useful icon tools

This directory contains tools that were used in the 2015–2016 era to construct Chrome icons. (Please accept our deepest apologies for this being a Google-only bug; it contains a lot of internal build information and images.)

Chromium has entered the era of icons being backed by asset catalogs and the era of lovingly–hand-crafted .icns files is over. Nevertheless, these tools remain useful for diagnostic purposes.

To compile these tools, run make in this directory. Note that libpng is required.

Tool list

• makeicns: This tool takes an .iconset directory of .png files and creates an .icns file containing them. However, it cannot create the old-style data/mask image pairs, which is why makeicns2 is preferred.
• makepng: This tool is used by the unmakeicns tool. It reconstructs a .png file from the uncompressed data of an old-style data/mask image pair. It is available separately should this be a capability you require.
• maketoc.py: This tool can be used to both create a TOC section for an .icns file, as well as verify one. The makeicns2 tool automatically creates a TOC section, but this tool's verification of these sections may be useful.
• unmakeicns: This tool takes an .icns file and unpacks it into its constituent images. For the old-style data/mask image pairs, this tool will reconstitute the two into a more useful .png file.
• unpackicon: This tool is used by the unmakeicns tool. It takes the data from an old-style data/mask image pair, which is encoded with a simple PackBits-esque RLE scheme, and outputs the data uncompressed. It is available separately should this be a capability you require.