Step 2 - The Appearance Dialogue When we have all our images and icons in our folder we need to run WorkShelf and configure the theme. You can run the preferences dialog either by clicking on the left mini-tab, or by double-clicking the icon in the systray (if it is showing). First, click on the 'Appearance Preferences' button (the top one), to set up some basic settings for the theme. (Note that the preview below the 'browse' button may not show our design just yet.) Browse to find the folder which we have put our images in first. Next, click on the 'Advanced' button on the right. On this dialogue, for now, just check the 'Advanced Skinning' and 'Bitmap Transparency' boxes for both tabs and body (4 checkboxes in all) and click on the 'Ok' button to close it. We should see our design showing in the preview now. The button directly below the preview will say either 'Active Shelf' or 'Inactive Shelf' to indicate which state of the tabs we are about to edit. We need to set some text fonts and colours. Ignore the buttons below the 'Active/Inactive Shelf' button, and move lower down to where it says 'Text Colour' (the buttons and boxes above and the 'edge colour' boxes only refer to the 'Simple' mode of skinning which we aren't using). Set the text colour to black and the font to Tahoma 8pt. You should see the preview change to reflect our choices. Change the 'Active/Inactive Shelf' button and repeat the above to set the inactive shelf text to dark grey (78/78/78), Tahoma 8pt. For the icons, we need to choose the font (Tahoma 7pt) and it's colour (the same dark grey). We can choose a style for highlighted icons: they can have a square bevel or a rounded-square highlight background, for which we can choose a colour. Try them out and see which you prefer. Ignore the 'Tab Style' section which is only used by the 'simple' skinning mode. Since we have designed our own scroll arrows we can also ignore the 'Scroll Arrow Style', section too. Had we not created our own, we could have set them to either black or white. Finally, for our design we can turn the base splitter line off.   the Appearance dialogue

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