Appearence - How do you want your Zeta to look?

Main Menu

Installation

System

Preferences

Applications

Demos

Advanced

Related Topics
Background How to add extra font sets

Appearence - How do You Want Your Zeta to Look?

### General

Zeta comes with a selection of decors preinstalled, some real eyecandies. More decors can be downloaded from http://www.zeta-looks.org (from this site you can also download wallpapers, icons and system sounds).

Changes in the Decor are done in real-time.

Separator Style: This entry lets you set the appearence of the lines that separate the different groups of items in the menus.

Triggers are the underlined letters in the pulldown menus, and represents the keyboard shortcuts. If you are not only using the Mouse to execute commands (menu options), you should enable Always Show Triggers.

Menu ZSnake:

### Fonts

Appearence lets you set the system fonts and the size of the font caches. There are three types of system fonts: Plain, bold and fixed-spaced. Individual fonts have additional pop-ups that let you choose among style options available for that font. You can set the size, from 9 to 18 points, with the Size popup. The maximum font size is limited to 18 points. Other wise the entries would cause the menus to be too wide, or the system would have to cut off the ends of longer words / terms in the menu. The higher screen resolution you have, the smaller the text in menus will appear on your screen. To make the text easier to read, simply change the Font Size.

First of all, you can change the font used in menus. You can choose between all fonts installed, not only the ones that came with the operating system.

<screenshot Fonts>

You can change the default fonts for practical purposes, such as making text on buttons easier to read, or for purely aesthetic reasons such as giving your desktop more character. Zeta comes with many different fonts, and each individual font is comprised of different characteristics and such as size and style. The size of a font is measured in points.

Screen font cache size: Determines how much RAM is allocated to hold font bitmaps. A large cache means faster screen redraws, and less RAM available for applications. Printing font cache size: Determines how much RAM is allocated to printer fonts. A large cache means faster printing, but less RAM available for applications. You need a Printer Font Cache only if you print to HP LaserJet-compatible printers.

A tutorial on how to add extra font sets.

Triggers are the underlined letters in the pulldown menus, and represents the keyboard shortcuts. If you are not only using the Mouse to execute commands (menu options), you should enable Always Show Triggers.

Shortcut Keys are the last two entries in this Preference applications, and are closely related to the triggers. Either Ctrl or Alt has to be enabled, and you can't choose both. If you are used to using shortcuts in Windows, we guess that you will work best with Ctrl enabled. If you are used to using shortcuts in MacOS on the other hand, we recommend you to enable Alt as Shortcut Key.

### Colors

Zeta comes with the possibility change most of the default color settings, and most of them can be changed with an interactive RGB slider.

By clicking the pop-down menu Color, you can choose what part of the graphical user interface you would like to change the color on:

<screenshot>

You change the color by mixing the the R:, G: and B: channels. You can see the color result on the right side of the window:

<screenshot>

Pressing the Defaults button will restore the default Appearence settings for all the things that you have customized.

©2003-2004 by yellowTAB GmbH