How to make more robust visual styles

from WinCustomize Forums



A lot of skins, if not most skins, don't set the caption height.

WindowBlinds only paints in the areas it has reserved from the OS which is the height of the title bar for instance.  But Windows itself will paint anywhere between teh size of the title bar and the caption height.

That is why it's important for skin authors to enter in the caption height (being the height of their title bar) into SkinStudio so that they make their skins.

A lot of the entries in the GUI Olympics don't have this set. The screenshot shown here is how it should be set (I correct them on my system as I go along).

What happens is that you end up with weird drawing aroudn borders, the "Classic" title bar will show up in MDI windows and in other title bars, and things can get sized funny.

You can also fix this yourself if you download a skin just by downloading SkinStudio (www.skinstudio.net) and going to the section shown in here and changing the caption height to be the same height as the title bar (example: 23 pixels).

If you've submitted something to the GUI Olympics, feel free to update your skin.

2,094 views 5 replies
Reply #1 from WinCustomize Forums Top
If you have a titlebar of say 17 pixels, and you set the Caption Height to 17, it affects the icons on the taskbar, making them really tiny. This is why I haven't been using that setting.



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Reply #3 from WinCustomize Forums Top
I've got a skin with a titlebar 9 pixels high. That really makes a mess of the icons when the Caption Height is that. Its an intersting effect tho. Whoah! Did some fooling around in that area and fixed another problem I was having! Cool.
Reply #4 from WinCustomize Forums Top
the system tray icon is by default 16x16 pixels. So is it safe to say that the caption height needs to be at least 16??
Reply #5 from WinCustomize Forums Top
Still 16pix titlebar is definately going to feel small, might be clean and tight but still small.

Also noticed in the past if caption is not set to correct height by the author console windows becomes evil! it is easily fixed though.