-- Main.arnold - 25 Mar 2006

Welcome!

Welcome to the Napkin Look & Feel wiki. This is for notes on using the pluggable Napkin Look & Feel.

Here at the beginning, the one thing that clearly would be useful is hints on how to use Napkin for various applications. If more content shows up, we can move this off to a page of its own.

General Notes

• If you are starting the Java VM yourself, the direct way to set your LAF is by the property swing.defaultlaf.

java -Dswing.defaultlaf=net.sourceforge.napkinlaf.NapkinLookAndFeel ...

• To do this you have to add napkinlaf.jar to the classpath, which can be a pain. If you can, it's easier to add the jar to the JRE's lib/ext directory, which is where installed extensions go. Then it will always be available.

• Applications that let you set your own look and feel often look for installed LAFs and present them as options. The list of installed LAFs is stored in the JRE's swing.properties file. This is in the lib directory. Add lines that look something like the following:

swing.installedlafs=aqua,napkin
swing.installedlaf.aqua.name=Aqua
swing.installedlaf.aqua.class=apple.laf.AquaLookAndFeel
swing.installedlaf.napkin.name=Napkin
swing.installedlaf.napkin.class=net.sourceforge.napkinlaf.NapkinLookAndFeel

• There may or may not be an installedlafs property already in the file. If so, append to it. In my case (Mac OS X), there was none, just a statement of the default LAF, so I added one. If there already is one, add napkin to it.

Next Version

You can find notes about our next release features at NapkinDotNextPlan.

Asking Questions

Where is the right place to ask questions about the NapkinLAF? (In particular I would like to change the default font used by TextArea^?'s from Roman to the font the buttons use.)