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.