Creating Bitmaps for NX3+

Over the years there have been a few formats for bitmaps in NX. Since toolbars started to appear then icons in the menus, and bitmaps in the dialogs the formats have changed. Originally it was bmp format of the size 24 and 32 for color and monochrom with 16 colors. Along with the different format also was a naming convention of image_lc.bmp image_sc.bmp, image_sm.bmp, image_lm.bmp. For large color, small color, large monochrome, and small monochrome. With NX3 and newer NX now can scale the drawings down or up to fit the size of the interface the user picks. Scaling up never looks good so my experience is to create one color image using 24bit resolution at a size of 48×48. Name it image.bmp (replacing it with your name). Notice there are not any additional naming convention on the end. So instead of having two images to maintain, you know have one. Any area that is meant to be transparent should be magenta (R=192, G=192, B=192). NX will use an alpha mask to convert that to transparent. When the user changes their O/S Background image the icon will still look good. If want partially transparent you will need to create two images, one black background and the other white background naming the images. image.21.white.bmp and image.21.black.bmp acordingly.

Personally i would never do partially transparent just because of the additional maintence. This format only works for menus and toolbar icons. The styler images still do not use this alpha mask and size standard yet. Perhaps NX5 everything will be the same image.

Where do you put these images for your custom menus and toolbars? One option is to put it in the application folder, or put it in the bitmap folder defined by the custom bitmap, or use set the custom directory environment variable but append each directory where a folder is located at using the custom bitmap environment variable=environment variable; new path.