Creating your own Themes
You can use the Lister Themes
dialog to create a theme from your current Opus configuration. A theme is a
collection of colors, fonts, sounds and images that all go towards making up the
appearance of a Directory Opus Lister. When you create a theme file you can
specify which elements to include in it, and you can then share the created
.dlt file with your friends.
To create a new theme, select the Lister Themes command from
the Settings menu, and then within the dialog choose the
Save New Theme command from the File menu.
You must provide a number of parameters when saving a theme:
- Theme Name: The name of the new theme. This is the name
that will be displayed in the themes list in the Lister Themes dialog.
- Description: This lets you provide a description of your
new theme.
- Author Info: You can use this to provide some information
about yourself (your name, or a copyright string if desired)
- Preview Image: This lets you embed a preview image in the
theme file. This preview is displayed as a thumbnail in the themes list in the
Lister Themes dialog, and as a larger preview when your theme is selected from
the list. It's good to provide a preview so that people you share your theme
with have some idea of what they're going to get when they apply it. Or, as in
the above example, so they can choose not to apply it!
You can provide
a preview image in two ways; either you can use the Browse
()
button to select an image file from disk, or you can click the Paste
() button
to paste an image from the clipboard into the theme. This lets you take a
quick snapshot of a Lister by pressing Alt+PrtScr (which
copies the active window to the clipboard) and paste it into your new theme
without having to save it as a disk file first. Use the Clear
() button to clear the preview image.
- Theme Options: These options let you choose which aspects
of your configuration are to be included in the theme. For example, you may
only want your theme to specify colors and images. The options you check will
be included in the theme and when the theme is applied, only those aspects of
the configuration will be changed. If you choose to export toolbar icons then
when you save the theme you will be prompted to select the installed icon sets
that you want saved as part of the theme.
Once you have defined your theme click the Save button to
save it. The theme will be saved to your Directory Opus themes folder, and will
show up in the Lister Themes dialog immediately. You can then
use the Export Theme command from the File
menu of that dialog to export the .dlt file to share
with others.