Ugly "disabled" images of TMainMenu

Question

Delphi 2010, Win32 VCL. I need to create a main menu for my application with the most standard look. TMainMenu looks nice in all Windows versions, the only bad thing is when it displaying images for items with Enabled=False.

Delphi has some strange method for building that disabled images (b/w extrusion with bevels, for me it looks like spew). I want to make a patch for that procedure in VCL sources and let menu to select disabled images from the same TImageList, but I can't find it.

Is it exists at all or it is some standard windows API call? Do you know where is that procedure located?

Sure OwnerDraw style can fix all this but I want a bit faster solution.

Answer 1

There's a great post on Galfar's Lair blog which describes the problem, and has code for a workaround, overriding the TImageList DoDraw method.

Here's the pic (linked) showing the 'before' and 'after'.

I think this relates to pretty much all Delphi versions.

Answer 2

If you can provide your images as PNG you can use TPngImageList from PngComponents. It has different options to make a blended or grayscaled disabled image. The PNG format allows you to make use of alphablending.