The Free Pascal compiler itself doesn't create any resource les; it just compiles them into the
executable. To create resource les, you can use some GUI tools as the Borland resource workshop;
but it is also possible to use a Windows resource compiler like gnu windres. windres comes with
the gnu binutils, but the Free Pascal distribution also contains a version which you can
use.
The usage of windres is straightforward; it reads an input le describing the resources to create and
outputs a resource le.
A typical invocation of windres would be
windres -i mystrings.rc -o mystrings.res
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this will read the mystrings.rc le and output a mystrings.res resource le.
A complete overview of the windres tools is outside the scope of this document, but here are some
things you can use it for:
-
stringtables
- that contain lists of strings.
-
bitmaps
- which are read from an external le.
-
icons
- which are also read from an external le.
-
Version information
- which can be viewed with the Windows explorer.
-
Menus
- Can be designed as resources and used in your GUI applications.
-
Arbitrary data
- Can be included as resources and read with the windows API calls.
Some of these will be described below.