Owner's Manual (Complete)

The Home Control Assistant
1
Chapter 19
Icon Themes
As you create devices, programs, and groups, you place icons for them on the displays shown in
the display pane. HCA includes a varied selection of icons for the devices you may have in your
home. However, HCA may not have anticipated all your icon needs. With Icon Themes, you can
add additional icons that you have created.
You can draw icons using many popular graphics programs, including the Paint program that is
part of your Windows installation. HCA can load icons from Windows bitmap files, those that end
with a .BMP file extension, JPEGs, or PNG files that contain a transparency layers.
This chapter discusses the icon gallery and how to use it. Topics covered include:
 What are Icon themes
 Choosing a theme for a display and a default them for your design
 Adding icons to an existing theme
 Modifying theme icons
 Creating a new theme
 Important facts about icons
What are icon themes
An icon theme is a set of icons that HCA gives a name to. When stored on the disk, a theme is a
folder and the members of that theme are the bitmap files contained in that folder.
When HCA installs in your documents area, a folder called “Icon themes” is created as a sub-
folder of “HCA”. In that folder are as many themes as you have.
Each theme contains a number of icons. If you examine these folders you can see that they contain
a number of bitmap files and a file called Theme.txt. Here is theme.txt from the one theme:
[Metrics]
cxStandard=54
cyStandard=54
cxCell=108
cyCell=108
The cxStandard and cyStandard supplies the size, in pixels, of the width and height of each icon in
this theme. The xcCell and cyCell supplies the spacing of icons on a HCA display showing icons
that you have not arranged in any particular order. That is, the auto-arrange option is enabled.
Each icon theme has a different theme.txt file and as such can be a set of icons of whatever size
you need. The only requirement is that all icons in a theme are the same size.
Within the theme folder the filenames of the bitmap files are the names that you work with in
HCA. For example, if there is a bitmap file called “Table Lamp.bmp”, then in HCA where you
select an icon for a device, program, or group, you will see the name “Table Lamp”.
If an icon has different representations based upon state – on, off, or dim – the bitmap file is
suffixed with “_on“, “_off”, or “_dim