Chapter 4
Creating custom layout themes
FileMaker Pro and FileMaker Pro Advanced use a variety of layout
themes to describe the colors, patterns, fonts, and borders of text,
fields, and parts in a new layout.
A theme is an Extensible Markup Language (XML) document that
can be read and edited in a text editor (such as Notepad for Windows
or BBEdit for Mac
OS X) or XML editor (such as XML SPY or
XMetaL). You can customize an existing theme or create your own,
and then use the New Layout/Report assistant to apply the custom
theme when you create layouts for your databases. You can modify
attributes defined by the theme in Layout mode after the layout is
created. However, you can’t apply a theme to an existing layout.
Note A FileMaker theme is not a stylesheet and does not contain
positioning information for objects on a layout.
For information about:
1 using layout themes and designing layouts, see Help
1 XML and its uses, see www.filemaker.com/xml
1 publishing your database on the web in XML format, see the PDF
manual, FileMaker Instant Web Publishing Guide
Modifying FileMaker Pro Advanced themes
FileMaker Pro and FileMaker Pro Advanced include theme files that
can be modified. A theme file can contain more than one theme. For
example, the Blue_gold.fth file contains two themes: “Blue and Gold
Screen” (for viewing onscreen) and “Blue and Gold Print” (for
printing).
Create themes to automatically apply different styles to text and background fills in layout parts, fields, and field labels
Fill color and pattern for header part
Fill color and pattern for body part
Fill color and pattern for footer part
Field label
Field text
Field fill, border and shadow effect
Text in footer part
Text in header part
