Friday 16 July 2004 — This is more than 20 years old. Be careful.
With all of the new laptops in my life recently, one thing I’ve gotten good at is changing the Display properties to get the Windows desktop to look the way I want it. The key change is to set every font (window title, message box, icon, everything) to Verdana 10.
When I got all through with the changes, I saved my theme into a .theme file. Being curious, I examined it. Despite its new-age 5-letter file extension, it’s a text file, formatted like a classic .ini file. But the word “Verdana” didn’t appear anywhere in it. Odd.
The only part of the file I didn’t understand was the Metrics section which contains long strings of numbers:
[Metrics]
IconMetrics=76 0 0 0 132 0 0 0 92 0 0 0 1 0 0 0 243 255 255 255
0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 144 1 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 86 101 114 100
97 110 97 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
NonclientMetrics=84 1 0 0 1 0 0 0 17 0 0 0 17 0 0 0 19 0 0 0 19
0 0 0 243 255 255 255 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 188 2 0 0 0 0 0 0
0 0 0 0 86 101 114 100 97 110 97 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 18 0 0 0 18 0 0 0 243 255 255 255 0 0 0 0 0
0 0 0 0 0 0 0 188 2 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 86 101 114 100 97 110 97
0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 18 0 0 0 18 0
0 0 243 255 255 255 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 144 1 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
0 0 0 86 101 114 100 97 110 97 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 243 255 255 255 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 144 1
0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 86 101 114 100 97 110 97 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 243 255 255 255 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
0 0 0 144 1 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 86 101 114 100 97 110 97 0 0 0
0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
That’s when the repeated sequence “86 101 114 100 97 110 97” caught my eye. Too many years of debugging have taught me to notice numbers that smell suspiciously like ASCII. Sure enough, that’s “Verdana” in ASCII.
What’s going on here? The names of the entries are the tip off: these are simple decimal byte-for-byte dumps of the windows structures ICONMETRICS, NONCLIENTMETRICS, and the font information is the nested LOGFONT structure.
Anyway, back to the theme. If you want a Windows desktop done right, the information is all in the numbers above. Manual instructions: set
- all the fonts to Verdana 10,
- the caption button size to 19,
- the icon spacing to 100 horizontal and 60 vertical,
- the tooltip color to a little yellower than the default.
Comments
One of the first things I did when I installed Windows XP is get rid of the default theme. That thing is ugly. And the "Classic" 95/98/2000 theme has always been ugly. Though it's tough finding themes that aren't just as ugly as the default and don't break usability (and don't use the resource-hogging WindowBlinds), I've been quite happily using Odyssey 3 for awhile. Quite nice.
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