Icon library

File Format
Name	Icon library
Ontology	Electronic File Formats Graphics Icon library
Extension(s)	.icl, .dll, others

This article is about a particular family of formats. For more icon library formats, see Graphics#Icon, Cursor, and Avatar files.

Icon library is a loosely-defined family of Microsoft Windows file formats that store multiple icons in a DLL or DLL-like NE or PE file.

Discussion

Broadly speaking, an icon library could be any such file whose only significant content is icon resources. An example is the moricons.dll file included with Windows 3.1 and later.

More narrowly, there are varieties of this format that use a special filename extension, and/or have other distinguishing characteristics. One of the most notable is the .icl format made by Icon Manager (and later Microangelo) by Impact Software.

Formats

Some specific Icon library formats have their own article:

• Icon library (Easy Icons) (.icl)
• Icon library (hDC Icon Designer) (.il)
• Icon library (Impact Software) (.icl)
• Icon library (Norton Icon Editor) (.nil)

Identification

There's no simple way to determine that an NE or PE file contains only icons.

Refer to the articles listed above for specific derivative formats.

Software

• ExtractIcon function
• ICL extractor programs

Sample files

• http://cd.textfiles.com/desktopworks/ICON_LIB/
• Zapaticons
• VARICONS.ZIP → MORICONS.DLL
• Pegasus Vol.7 → PEGASUS/WIN95/FUN/NEKO9510.ZIP → *.icl (some NE format, some PE)
• TBAR32.ZIP → TOOLBAR.ICL (PE format)

Links

• Icon library (RW-Designer)
• Wikipedia:ICO (file format)#Icon library