The original question below has been overtaken by time: these days you do not have to supply icons or icon sets for your documents any more, as macOS will generate a standard icon out of your application icon and the system document icon template. See https://developer.apple.com/news/?id=5i6jlf4d This seems a recent development, the document in the link is dated January 2021.
You still have to supply CFBundleDocumentTypes in your plist, to bind the document extension to your application, but leave out CFBundleTypeIconFile that you can use to attach your own iconset to your documents.
Original question:
Is there a template available for the Mac OS X document icon? It looks like a white piece of paper with the top right corner curled down. Lots of applications seem to use this icon as a base for their own custom document types. Does everyone use a template for the basic shape, or does every developer have to draw their own from scratch?
I know you can get the plain document icon here:
/System/Library/CoreServices/CoreTypes.bundle/Contents/Resources/GenericDocument.icns
But that is in .icns format rather than a format I can easily edit. Also, it doesn’t make it easy if you want the document background to be anything but white.
It would be great if there is a Photoshop (.psd) template available for each icon size (512, 256, 128, 32, 16).
There are several tools, that converts your image (drawn in Photoshop) into an icon-format:
To convert an icon-format into another graphic-format (so you can easily modify) I can recommend:
Greate sources for free icons are:
Please read the licence of the sets you download! You can download a lot of free icons there and reuse them or even modify them. Then you can convert them back into the icon-format with the tools mentioned above.