DaFT Themes

There is currently 1 theme available. It can be downloaded from the DaFT project page at Sourceforge.net from here. DaFT has several themes built in already.

Installation

The theme zip file dows not need to be unzipped. DaFT will take care of it's installation. All you need to do is:

1. Select the zip file from the DaFT's file browser in the Themes tab on the Change Settings window. (See figure right).
   
2. When the zip file is selected, click on the Add Theme button. The theme will be copied to DaFT's themes directory, and added to it's list of themes.
   
3. To activate the theme, select it from the list and click on Apply.

Creating themes

Creating a Theme for DaFT is a bit like creating a web page: You have to create or change the GIF images, and define some colors. But there is a difference: DaFT is not written html but in Tcl/Tk. So the widgets (frames, buttons, checkboxes, scrollbars, etc) are created by the Tk toolkit engine. Since DaFT version 1.3.0 most (yes, not all of them :( ) are created with the Tile Tk styling engine (see http://tktable.sourceforge.net/ and http://tktable.sourceforge.net/tile/doc/index.html for documentation on tile). 

DaFT comes with a set of built-in themes, but it can be extended with "custom" themes. A theme file tells the the tile engine how the tile widgets must look in normal mode, pressed mode, or when the widget is activated, or just what the background and forground colors must be, and which font and size the texts must have.  

A custom theme for DaFT is basically a tcl/tk package.  In order to be easily distributed and mounted by the tclkit engine, all files must be packaged in a zip file. If we regard the zip file as a directory, the root of the directory must contain a file with the name pkgIndex.tcl. This file tells the the tclkit engine what the name of the package is, and what to do with it. The name of the package is also the name of the theme. Therefore the package should be named something like: tile::theme::mythemename . The version number behind it is not used at the moment. 

# Package index for Mytheme example

if {[file isdirectory [file join $dir mytheme]]} {
    package ifneeded tile::theme::mytheme 1.0 \
        [list source [file join $dir mytheme.tcl]]
}

In the tcl file the images directory is set with statement:

    set imgdir [file join [file dirname [info script]] mytheme]

So we need a subdirectory called mytheme where we put all the images. The images must all be in GIF format, because this is the only format tclkit understands without loading the Img package.  Tip: You could include it in your theme, see also the graphical examples given in the Tile demo kit.

An example of the images used in the ITFT theme:

	normal	hover/ active	pressed
Button
Checkbox unchecked
Checkbox checked
Radio button Off
Radio button On
Tab
Scrollbar vertical
Scrollbar horizontal
Arrow down
Arrow up
Arrow left
Arrow Right
Slider vertical (not used in DaFT)
Slider horizontal (not used in DaFT)