enigma2 skins ============= A skin file is an XML file. Better read the existing skin file as an example. colors ====== you can define alias names for different colors. the "value" is given as #aarrggbb, or just #rrggbb. windowstyle =========== here you can configure the "window style", i.e. the bord around windows. screens ======= these are the different widgets for the screens. they can also be embedded in the screens itself. A NOTE ABOUT PNGs ================= Enigma can user either a 32bit argb or an 8bit pseudocolor output. In any case, enigma uses 8bit PNGs for skins. Though it would be easy to support 32bit pngs as well, it questionable if this would be a great idea. a.) the quality improvement is realative you can use another palette for each png. that gives you unique 256 colors for each skin element. Unless you have very big PNGs, you shouldn't be able to notive the difference between 32bit and 8bit. b.) 32bit skins wouldn't be compatible to 8bit displays we still want to use enigma on hardware which is too slow for using a 32bit output (after all, framebuffers can be very slow). Turning a 32bit bitmap into an 8bit one is not ease and involves a lot of computations. It would end up that you need to specify an 8bit and a 32bit version. Is that really what you want? c.) 32bit PNGs don't compress well PNG is a lossless format. 32bit bitmap data is very hard to compress lossless. We could use JPG, but jpgs don't offer a transparency channel, as far as i know. So, how to make your PNGs to look good? It's simple. Edit them as 32bit ARGB (photoshop, gimp should be able to do this fine!). Be sure that if you want alphatest, transparency really has an alpha value of 0 / 255 (i.e. the extreme). When you're finished, use "pngquant 256 " to process your PNGs to be compatible with enigma. note: ===== if you're having less than 16 colors in your png file, pngquant generates a 16color (4bit) PNG, which is not really what we want. Either add more colors (evil workaround), fix enigma (good idea!) or patch pngquant to always create 8bit pngs.