Now that the resource mechanism has been added to the project, actions can now be added to the tool bar with appropriate icons. Contrary to what was said at the beginning of the last post, tool bar items can be text and are text if no icon has been assigned to them. In any case, icons will be used here for the tool bar. Also, when an action has an assigned icon, the icon also appears on the menu item in the menus.
First icons need to be assigned to the actions. The easiest way to do this is with Designer inside QtCreator. The icons can be assigned the same as with the MainWindow object, but it is easier to add the icons from the Action Editor tab at the bottom of Designer. Double-clicking on the action brings up the Edit Action dialog. The icon is added by clicking the ... button on the Icon: field line. Appropriate icons were added to all of the actions. To add the actions to the tool bar, the actions are simply dragged from the Action Editor to the tool bar.
Note: The icons will not be available on the Select Resource dialog until the program has been built after the icons have been added to the resource file.
The icons were obtained from the KDE Oxygen icon set (found in the /usr/share/icons/oxygen/32x32/actions/ directory on Linux) except for the Qt icon, which was obtained from the Qt SDK. All of the icon file names were renamed to match the menu and menu item the icon was assigned to. The Oxygen icons can be distributed with the source code and embedded within the program as long as the program is under the LGPL (Lesser GNU Pulbic License) version 3, which this program is being developed under.
[commit a2d2675627]
Monday, December 31, 2012
GUI – Icons and Resources
The next item for the GUI is to add items to the tool bar, which has already been created, but is currently only blank. Unlike the menu items which are text, the tool bar items are icons. It is convenient if the icons are part of the application file and not separate files that must be included to run and must be loaded by the application.
This is accomplished by converting the icon files into C++ source files that are then compiled and linked into the application. The Qt Resource Compiler (RCC) is used to convert the icon files to source files. All the resources for the program are listed in an XML resource (.qrc) file. QtCreator makes it easy to create and maintain these resource files.
To create the resource file, the new file wizard was again utilized. Under Files and Classes the Qt item (lower-left) and Qt Resource file (upper-right) was selected. On the next Choose the Location dialog, the Name: field was set to ibcp.qrc. On the next Project Management dialog, the defaults were selected (which was set to git). Once finished, QtCreator opened up a specific resources editing window.
To start simple, an application icon was given to the program, which will appear in the upper corner of the application window and on the task bar of the OS. Up to now, a generic icon was being used (an X icon on Linux/KDE and a generic program icon on Windows). An icon file was created by the name ibcp.png and placed in the new images sub-directory. The image chosen and created consists of two lightning bolts, which represents the letter I, two to represent Interactive and Incremental, for the type of BASIC compiler being created. The lightning bolt itself represents speed, since the goal of this project is to make a fast interactive BASIC compiler.
To add this new icon to the resource file, the Add button at the bottom resource editing window was clicked and Add Prefix was selected. The Prefix: field, which defaulted to /new/prefix1 was cleared (which set it to a single slash). The Add/Add Files was then selected, which opened a file selection dialog. The images/ibcp.png file was selected, which added the file to the resource list.
To assign this icon file to the application, in Designer, the MainWindow object was selected (upper-right panel) and under properties (lower-right panel), the ... button was clicked for the windowIcon property, which displayed a Select Resource dialog. The images item (left-side) was selected, which displayed the ibcp.png icon (right-side), which was selected.
To finish, the building of the resources needed to be added to the CMake build file. Resources are handled by the qt4_add_resources command that is added as part of the Qt4 CMake module. This command is given a list of resource files (in this case ibcp.qrc) and produces a list of resource source files that are generated by RCC. This list of generated source files was then added to the add_executable command.
[commit ba9ee1be2a]
This is accomplished by converting the icon files into C++ source files that are then compiled and linked into the application. The Qt Resource Compiler (RCC) is used to convert the icon files to source files. All the resources for the program are listed in an XML resource (.qrc) file. QtCreator makes it easy to create and maintain these resource files.
To create the resource file, the new file wizard was again utilized. Under Files and Classes the Qt item (lower-left) and Qt Resource file (upper-right) was selected. On the next Choose the Location dialog, the Name: field was set to ibcp.qrc. On the next Project Management dialog, the defaults were selected (which was set to git). Once finished, QtCreator opened up a specific resources editing window.
To start simple, an application icon was given to the program, which will appear in the upper corner of the application window and on the task bar of the OS. Up to now, a generic icon was being used (an X icon on Linux/KDE and a generic program icon on Windows). An icon file was created by the name ibcp.png and placed in the new images sub-directory. The image chosen and created consists of two lightning bolts, which represents the letter I, two to represent Interactive and Incremental, for the type of BASIC compiler being created. The lightning bolt itself represents speed, since the goal of this project is to make a fast interactive BASIC compiler.
To add this new icon to the resource file, the Add button at the bottom resource editing window was clicked and Add Prefix was selected. The Prefix: field, which defaulted to /new/prefix1 was cleared (which set it to a single slash). The Add/Add Files was then selected, which opened a file selection dialog. The images/ibcp.png file was selected, which added the file to the resource list.
To assign this icon file to the application, in Designer, the MainWindow object was selected (upper-right panel) and under properties (lower-right panel), the ... button was clicked for the windowIcon property, which displayed a Select Resource dialog. The images item (left-side) was selected, which displayed the ibcp.png icon (right-side), which was selected.
To finish, the building of the resources needed to be added to the CMake build file. Resources are handled by the qt4_add_resources command that is added as part of the Qt4 CMake module. This command is given a list of resource files (in this case ibcp.qrc) and produces a list of resource source files that are generated by RCC. This list of generated source files was then added to the add_executable command.
[commit ba9ee1be2a]
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)