I recently purchased Winstep Xtreme and it's great I would like to create my own theme. In order to figure out how to do it I have been opening existing theme elements and making changes to the png files in PSCS5. I'm having a bit of a problem figuring out some of the codes in the text files. Making small changes to a png has no effect, but a larger change requires adjustment to the text files in the themes and those abbreviations in the text files make them hard to hack for a part time hacker like me. Now I know you are working on a program for themes, but I just can't leave well enough alone so if there is a rosetta stone for themes, I would like to read a small bit of it please. Thanks.

Join the club...
Actually, I've been reverse-engineering the skin files for a while now. It's not as hopeless as you think at first. It makes sense, only you'll need to start experimenting and download more themes and look into their configs and so on.
As for documentation... yeah... if you find one, let me know.

Hey Skagon, you also know the reason, so you might as well tell him why things are the way they are. Skinning options used to be in the application's GUI - which means you didn't need to edit configuration text files - but, because very few users will actually make a skin, they were removed from there in order to simplify things when the UI was revamped a while ago.

The idea is to put those skinning options in a separate application called the 'Winstep Theme Builder', which is currently being worked on. Unfortunately, because focus has been on the applications themselves, progress has been a bit slow.

By the way, let me add that no customization application that I know of (other than Winstep) ever shipped with a detailed skinning tutorial. Winstep did, but the major revamp of the GUI also meant another User Guide had to be written from scratch.

Thanks Jorge. Your work is outstanding and I did read that the theme builder was in the works before posting the message. I'm like a kid with a new toy and I couldn't resist playing with it. Your themes are outstanding right out of the box. I will be checking back for updates and the new theme builder. Is there a team of code writers working for Winstep or is it just you? In any case congratulations on producing a great product.

Damn, I honestly meant to write that, but somehow, I didn't...
Sorry, mate.