Skins Part 2

The global.txt file

If you were a new user looking at the default skin for the first time, wondering how to make your own slick professional skin, the first thing you should look at is:
C:\Users\Public\Documents\SynthEdit Projects\skins\default\global.txt
This is where fonts, their sizes, colours, backgrounds, etc. are all defined.
Global.txt is the minimum requirement to have a new skin, here are the contents of the global.txt file as defined for the default skin.

Note: If you are familiar with CSS as used in web page design this will look familiar, it’s basically a cut down version of CSS.

Important Note: Never delete or modify the default skin or its global.txt file. Synthedit looks for these file when loading.
As with every other item in the default skin – that SynthEdit looks for when loading – if there is no definition in the global.txt file, it will refer back to the original default folder. That is why you don’t edit the default, among other reasons (you will get a strange display in structure view unless you really know what you’re doing).

Commenting:
A line prefixed by a semicolon is a comment, anything you put in a comment is not read by SE.
Commenting is useful as you may not remember why you changed a setting in a skin, and what the results of the change are. Comments are a designers best friend. Note: You can also use ‘//’ for commenting.

If you see the 3rd party skins made by experts, they only have a few items in them, you only need to include the objects you want to replace or change.
For example: you could, for example, make a skin called “Alternative Fonts1” and it would just contain global.txt – and your new global.txt need only contain a few references, not all, if you only wanted to change fonts for a few but not all text displays.

Fonts:
Beware of using unusual fonts. You’ll experience a bit of a disappointment seeing one of you projects on someone else’s computer with the wrong font, your fonts have to exist on the host system to display correctly, stick to the window (or MAC) system core fonts and you can’t go wrong.

Small Button and LED:– There is the difference between small button and switch or led. The small button is ‘click’ action -momentary- switch is ‘stepped’ -2step ‘latch’ , and the LED isn’t defined, and therefore is ‘passive’, a slave graphic.

Knob med.png and Knob small.png:- These are ‘type animated‘ with mouse response rotary.
In contrast to the fader used with the standard fader, which is a bitmap with a Mask, why the different method? I could replace the bitmap and mask with a PNG with transparency, as long as I observed positioning and size (making it much easier to make new faders)

Are you really supposed to start using the subcontrols knobs straight off? You don’t of course, you use the stock knob and fader when you’re knocking up an idea – so ideally, it would be nice to re-do those in your new skin, even if you were to use subcontrols.
In fact the quest would ideally be to produce a complete replacement generic skin where you can change the colours easily (for example).
That is quite a bit of work if you want to know what is going on with each different object type. The ‘workmanlike’ approach of just bashing out new graphics, rigorously adhering to default sizes, and maintaining consistency in style, may be the quickest and most effective way to achieve this, ultimately.

Note that there is a full set of parameters for each text category, but that it is not always used in full; so you could add extra parameters like background colour to them.

Colours: For some reason the method of specifying colours is non-standard. Instead of RR GG BB (the usual Red-Green-Blue format) in SynthEdit it’s reversed to BB GG RR!

Default skin global.txt (annotated)

;other skin settings
; EVERYTHING WITH SEMICOLONS IS IGNORED
; Fonts
; www.w3.org/TR/REC-CSS1#font-variant
; font-color – BBGGRR Blue-Green-Red mix, hexadecimal numbers
; background-color SAME (-1 = transparent)
; font-size – Height in pixels
; font-family – Searches available fonts, left to right. Specific font name, or generic…
; ‘serif’ (e.g. Times)
; ‘sans-serif’ (e.g. Helvetica)
; ‘cursive’ (e.g. Zapf-Chancery)
; ‘fantasy’ (e.g. Western)
; ‘monospace’ (e.g. Courier). Doesn’t seem to go smaller than 12 (Mind you too much smaller and it will be difficult to read, need to consider usability)
; Arial, Times New Roman, and Courier New are core fonts to Windows
;
; text-decoration underline (overline, line-through, blink not supported)
; font-style normal |italic (oblique not supported)

; font-weight : normal | bold | light | 100 | 200 | 300 | 400
; | 500 | 600 | 700 | 800 | 900
; following not supported at present: bolder | lighter
; text-align center | left | right
;UP TO THIS POINT, EVERYTHING IS INSTRUCTIONS FOR HOW TO DEFINE FONTS AND DISPLAY THEM
;
;TEXT DISPLAY CATEGORIES FOLLOW:
; >(text on modules title bar, structure view)
FONT_CATEGORY module_title
font-family Arial, “sans-Serif”
font-size 12
font-color #FFFFFF

FONT_CATEGORY panel_group (panel lines title font)
;font-family “System”, “sans-Serif” <THIS IS IGNORED but why 2 options below?
font-family “MS Sans Serif”, “sans-Serif”
font-size 14
font-weight bold
font-color #FFFFFF

FONT_CATEGORY control_label (never sure about this one.. ?default control text?)
;font-family System, “monoSpace”
;font-size 12
font-family “MS Sans Serif”, “sans-Serif”
font-size 14
font-weight bold
font-color #FFFFFF

FONT_CATEGORY control_edit (get confused by this one too..)
;font-family System, Arial, “sans-serif”
;font-size 12
font-family “MS Sans Serif”, “sans-Serif”
font-size 14
font-weight bold
;font-color #000000 – don’t apply to edit boxes

this one is obvious
; this category is for LED Stack item labels and rotary switch labels
FONT_CATEGORY switch_label
font-family Verdana, “monoSpace”
font-size 10
font-color #F5F5F5

FONT_CATEGORY selector_text >this too.
;font-family System, “monoSpace”
;font-size 10
font-family “MS Sans Serif”, “sans-Serif”
font-size 14
font-weight bold
font-color #ff0000

; the writing on container and VST plugin displays
FONT_CATEGORY tty
font-family terminal, monoSpace
font-size 10
font-color #00f000
background-color #000000

; plugs the pins in structure view?
FONT_CATEGORY plug
font-family Arial, “MS Sans Serif”, Verdana
font-size 10
font-color #000000

FONT_CATEGORY “Normal”
font-family “MS Sans Serif”
font-size 12
font-color #000000
background-color #ffffff
text-align center

FONT_CATEGORY “Heading 1”
font-family Arial, Verdana
font-size 28
font-color #fff7f7
text-align center
text-decoration underline
;font-style italic
font-weight 900

FONT_CATEGORY “Heading 2”
text-align center
font-family Arial
font-size 18

FONT_CATEGORY “Heading 3”
text-align center
font-family Arial
font-size 14

FONT_CATEGORY “User 1”
font-family Arial Unicode MS
font-size 14
font-color #464646
background-color #ffffff
text-align left

FONT_CATEGORY “User 2”
font-family Courier

FONT_CATEGORY “User 3”
font-family Fixedsys

More about Skins…
Skins Part 1
Skins Part 3