Using Styles, Brushes, and Control Themes to Customize the Wizard Interface

InstallShield 2016

Project • This information applies to the following project types:

Edition • The Advanced UI project type is available in the Professional edition of InstallShield. The Suite/Advanced UI project type is available in the Premier edition of InstallShield. For information about the differences between these two project types, see Advanced UI Projects vs. Suite/Advanced UI Projects.

InstallShield lets you define and customize various user interface–related styles, brushes, and control themes to easily change the look and feel of the wizard interface without requiring you to manually edit each user interface element individually. Using styles, brushes, and control themes helps to ensure that the wizard interface is formatted consistently throughout the installation.

Styles for the Wizard Interface

InstallShield contains a number of built-in text styles that define text attributes such as color, size, and font name for the text on the wizard UI. In addition, InstallShield contains one built-in font set, which is a collection of fonts (including attributes such as font name, size, and weight). For each font in a font set, you can specify to which language the font is applicable. This enables you to select a different font for each language that your project supports. Font sets work in conjunction with text styles. Text styles reference a font set but can optionally override various font attributes that are defined at the font set level. You can modify any of the built-in text styles and font sets and create your own as needed. To learn more, see:

Brushes for the Wizard Interface

InstallShield contains several built-in brushes. A brush specifies a solid color, a gradient, or an image for various elements of the wizard interface, such as the background of wizard pages and controls. You can modify any of the built-in brushes and create your own as needed. To learn more, see:

Control Themes for the Wizard Interface

InstallShield enables you to define themes for wizard interface controls. A control theme is a collection of colors for various parts of controls—text color, background color, and border color—and for various states of controls—such as clicked and hovered. You can specify the control theme that you want to use for the controls in your user interface by default. You can also override the theme for specific controls on wizard pages and windows in your user interface. Control themes give buttons and other items in your installation’s user interface a flat look (without the three-dimensional effects) that is reminiscent of the style of Windows Store apps.

The following types of controls support the use of control themes:

To learn more, see:

Customizing the Look and Feel of the Wizard Interface

The Wizard Pages node in the Wizard Interface view lets you select default project-wide styles, brushes, and control themes. The Wizard Pages node in this view also lets you override the default values for the wizard caption, wizard icon, and header image, and specify other project-wide UI-related default values.

Use page-specific and control-specific settings such as the Body Background setting that is available for specific wizard pages, secondary windows, and wizard controls if you want to override a specific use of a style. For example, the Body Background setting for the InstallationWelcome wizard page lets you override the project’s default background on just the InstallationWelcome wizard page.

See Also

Wizard Interface View

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