Icons
User icons
In FreeMind 0.9.0 beta, you can add your own icons to your minds maps, alongside the standard set of icons delivered with FreeMind, such as the priority icons or the flower icon. To do that, add PNG files of your icons to the folder <user_home>/.freemind/icons. FreeMind treats all *.png files in <user_home>/.freemind/icons as user icons, offering them in the list of available icons.
The size of icons can be arbitrary, not limited to 16 x 16 pixels.
If you send a mind map with your custom icons to another person, the person won't be able to see the icons, though, as the icon files are only stored at your local computer. To see the same icons as you do, the receiver of your mind map has to copy your icon files to his local folder with user icons.
Tool icons
Tool icons are icons used in the menus and toolbars of FreeMind to represent tools or actions, such as "Save". Tool icons are not meant to be changed by users, but they can be changed. If you are a technically minded user, you can set your own tool icons by replacing the standard ones in the "Freemind.jar" file. To do that, you need to unzip the "Freemind.jar" file, replace the icons, and zip it again. TODO: Describe the location of the icons in the zip file.
Icons in the code
Todo
Sources of free icons
FreeMind uses (a) tool icons used in the toolbars, and (b) icons used in nodes. Especially for the icons used in nodes, a good comprehensive source of free icons is needed. FreeMind uses PNG icons, in the size of 16 x 16. Nowadays many icons are drawn in SVG vector format first, and converted to 16 x 16 bitmap images afterwards.
Ideally, it would not be the task of FreeMind team to draw icons; this task should be outsourced instead. Whether this is a realistic assumption remains to be seen.
Sources of free icons:
- Icon Pack from Christopher Belliard. Thanks!
- Icons at kde-look
- Icons at gnome-look
- Crystal icons — an icon set often used in KDE desktop environment
- Tango Desktop Project — an icon library for KDE and Gnome, licenced under Creative Commons Attribution Sharealike
- Silk icons — 1000 icons licenced under Creative Commons attribution license
- Open Clip Art Library — a library used for some Mediawiki icons, mostly not suitable as a source of icons but rather as of clipart
- Open Clipart at Wikimedia commons
More relevant links
Terminology
- node icon
- An icon that a user can attach to a node, offered in the left toolbar.
- tool icon
- An icon that is assigne to a tool or action such s "Save as" or "Unfold".
- user icon
- A node icon that is not part of the standard FreeMind, but rather is added by a user.
