Hello
Why not use, if you need them, icons available on my site ? If you are interested in any of the items below, just click on it and save the file on your computer. Those items I have created are free of rights. The others can also be used on web pages, some of them within limits set forth by the owner of the rights (most often mentioning the source, sometimes a link back to the site of origin and/or permission valid only for non-commercial use). For more detail, please follow in each case the link to the original source).
Warning: For manipulating GIF images (animation, transparent background), I use the shareware Gif Construction Set from Alchemy Mindworks. I have a copy duly registered in my name which, each time I save a file, adds to the latter a tag saying that I am, at least in part, the author of the work. This is in some cases quite in excess of the truth, but it is independent of my own will. If I were using (illegally) an unregistered copy, there would also be a tag, and it would imply that the file has been churned out or tampered with by a pirate. In all cases where it is needed, I am giving back below proper credit to the actual source.

LED buttons
x x x x x x x x
The red one is modified from a public source on the web. I have constructed the others by editing the colour palette and taking care of preserving the background transparency.

Language buttons

eo en fr es pt ru ar
br cy ga gd eu gl ca oc co
fi no sv da nl de it el ja
Small flags (or their icon approximation) for making links to web pages written in other languages (mainly European). Apart for the first one, Esperanto, specially created for international exchanges, the top row is dedicated to major imperial languages used in several countries, or even several continents, and/or by populations numbering in the hundreds of millions. The symbol used is normally the flag of the country from which the language originates (e.g. Britain rather than the United States or Australia). For Arabic and Chinese (the latter still to come), choosing a representative country is either meaningless or unacceptable in part of the area where the language is used. This is why these languages are (will be) represented simply by their name, in their own writing. The second row is dedicated to minority languages of western Europe, spoken by communities to whom history has denied sovereign institutions (and sometimes any institution at all) and/or by only a fraction of the population in the relevant region or country. The flag of the Republic of Ireland is being used to symbolize Irish (Gaelic), spoken in practice by a (small) minority of people in its own realm, but which is recognised as an official language by the country. In the other cases, the flags are those used by the relevant communities to identify themselves, if only unofficially. The third row is dedicated, with similar conventions as for the first row, to national languages, i.e with an official and majority practice in one country, possibly extending to one or two neighbouring countries. In all cases, the languages are identified by the file names. The latter are written langYY.gif, where YY is a (lower case) two-letter code used by the ISO 639 norm to identify the relevant language. The same codes are used to declare the language of HTML pages in the META tags of their headers, or to specify the lang attribute. In some cases, these codes are similar to ISO 3136 country codes (e.g. fr for both France and the French language), in others they are different (e.g. br for Brazil as a country code, but for Breton as a language code).

Link icons
x x x
To make links to pages of links.

Right/Left arrows (Next/Back)
x x x x x x x x x
x x x x x x x x x
The first two ones (grey) are taken "as is" from the site of Brest 96, the second edition of the great tall ships festival. I do not think this is a major copyright infringement. I constructed the other ones in the same way as the LED buttons above.

Up/Down arrows
x x x x x x x x x
x x x x x x x x x
Obviously constructed (by me) by rotating the right/left arrows and editing the shadows. There is a slight imperfection in vertical alignment, which I may find the time to correct some day.

Blank buttons
x x x x
x x x x
These blank buttons can be complemented as you like, using the graphic software of your choice. They are in GIF format and coded with a 16 colour palette. The first colour (index 0) is transparent. Adding something in this colour is equivalent to carving a hole in the button, through which the page background will be seen. Graphic software will display this colour as quasi-white (FDFDFD). The next three colours (indexes 1 to 3) are specific to each button and correspond to the shadowed edge, the button surface and the lit edge, respectively. By editing them, you can thus obtain more blank buttons. The lit edge of the light grey button is quasi-white, but its code (FEFEFE) is not the same as for the transparent colour, to prevent graphic software to merge the two colours when the file is edited. The other colours, available for adding contents on the background, are the same for all buttons. Indices 4 through 11 correspond to a range of basic coulours, index 12 to a true white (FFFFFF), 13 and 14 to two grey hues, and 15 to black.

Typographic periods
x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x
- These are not really periods (dots) but square symbols. Typographic, because they are intended for use in combination with text, either at the beginning of paragraphs as exemplified here (e.g. in lists), or at the end of a text section. The latter use is common, in the publishing industry, for the final period of an article or a chapter. The patterns are made up of a 12×12 pixel visible area, followed on the right with an invisible area (transparent background) of equal size. The actual-size parameters for the code calling them (<img... tag) are therefore width=24 height=12. It is unnecessary to add a space after the square, because the space is already provided by the picture file. At the end of a text section, however, it might be necessary, for a better presentation, to add a space before the square. If so, a non-break space (HTML entity &nbsp;) should be used to prevent what actually is the final period from finding itself (alone) at the beginning of a line. The size of the squares is calculated for perfectly matching text composed with a font face such as Times and a "4" size code (HTML tag <font face="Times" size=4>). For size "3" text, as exemplified here, the size of the square may be reduced by 25% (as also exemplified here) by using the parameters width=18 height=9. The black square is not smaller than the others. The black border used with the other colours is replaced in this case with a neutral grey border which may go unseen against the default background colour of your browser's window. The same applies to the main area of the grey square.

Universal padding tool
imgnul
You do not see anything here, except for the border that marks a link (and which is removed from around the other icons on this page). This is normal, I am offering you an invisible image, actually a GIF entirely made up of transparent pixels. The actual size is 2×2 pixels (and the file is smaller than 100 bytes), but the display is enlarged with the parameters width and height. This is the regular way of using the icon, to obtain a custom-sized blank space on a web page. An example is found on the page where I am setting forth the copyright conditions appliable to the pictures from this site, where the padding tool is used to set the position of the signature at the end of the page. This signature is the sole contents of a right-aligned paragraph (<p align="right"> tag), but to prevent it from being stuck at the right edge of the page, it is immediately followed with a code shifting it to the left by 100 pixels, which is written:
<img src="imgnul.gif" width=100 height=2 border=0 alt="">
It is normally not necessary to include the parameter border=0 for the purpose of maintaining the image invisible, since the latter is not being used as a link. It is, however, a precaution against possible unusual behaviour by a maverick browser. Unpredictable differences in browser behaviour are actually the very reason for the use of the padding tool in this case. The same result could be obtained by adding a series of non-break spaces (&nbsp; entity) after the signature, but some browsers will collapse such a series into a single space. Along the vertical, the padding tool, adjusted with the parameter height, allows for finer tuning of blank spaces than the addition of line feed codes (<br> tag).

Screen backgrounds
x x x x x x
The first one was a grey background in GIF format found somewhere on the Web. It was possibly in the gallery of A1Clipart, but I am not sure (this site is anyway an excellent source of web graphism, and its links point towards the best resources). I have made this background more whitish and converted it to JPEG to decrease file size. I have derived the next four ones by manipulating the colour balance. For the last one in the row, which is more recent, I have found a new method yielding a GIF file somewhat lighter than the JPEG version, with the desired colour. The other backgrounds could have been redone in this way, but this would have required a change in too many page background links on this site.

x
The original of this border background comes fom the gallery of Windy. I had first to increase the lenght, to prevent the anchor pattern on the left from reappearing as a mid-screen column at the higher resolutions. The background itself was plain light blue. I replaced it with the pattern of the blue background in the row above, wich I had first adjusted for a proper colour match.

Miscellaneous


bouton bouton
bouton
bouton bouton
I created these buttons to use them as symbols of some topics or feelings on the reference page about my site. As said above, they are therefore free of rights. If you use them, however, I would appreciate that you find a way of including on your site a link back to mine.


Malbouffe I had put here a parody I had created of the logo of a junk food multinational, for use by whom might be interested, in the way they would like. I have since prudently removed it, pending making my mind about whether this is allowed by commercial laws. But the presence here of a space reserved for a self-censored item is somewhat significant. And the self-censorship icon itself might perhaps be put at some use. It says:
Provisionally (?)
(self-) censored


Construction This creation by Grenadine is available in its original version on her site La FONDerie/Web-Déco. I have reduced here the number of colours from 256 to 16, to shrink file size (3749 bytes as against 8629). This destroyed the background transparency, which I restored.


NoSpam Redrawn by me, from a component image in an animated GIF created by Cedge Design for a site which promoted an anti-spam campaign and no longer exists.


Interdiction I created this symbol to illustrate a special page "Error 403 Forbidden". This page is displayed on the present site, in support of a denial of access (return code 403), whenever a filter (in .htaccess or in a PHP script) detects an illegitimate request: a robot trying to bypass exclusion rules for instance. The icon can, of course, be used with any other interdiction message.


mail There are so many mail icons available on the web that I do not even remember where I found this one. But I have saved it with a better compression than the original, and the file tag says that the stuff is mine (see at the top of the page).



To be continued... (when I have time)

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