Themes and styling

The HTML templates, CSS, images and javascript files used by DapperDox are known as assets. Assets that collectively provide a particular look-and-feel are known as a theme.

By providing local assets, individual files can be overridden or customised to tailor DapperDox's presentation to meet your requirements, alternatively an entire theme can be created and imported into DapperDox.

If you provide local asset files, these are placed in the same assets directory structure as your authored content and guides.

Supplying local assets

DapperDox is directed to your local assets through the -assets-dir configuration option. These assets work within, and perhaps customise, the theme that you are using.

For details on what asset files you can and should override, refer to the section on customisation.

Changing themes

To switch themes, pass DapperDox the -theme configuration option giving the name of the theme you want to use. For example, select to the sectionbar theme (see built-in themes) with the option:

-theme=sectionbar

Built-in themes

DapperDox ships with two built-in themes.

1. default
2. sectionbar

Both these themes are built using bootstrap, as this is one of the most flexible, well documented and well understood frameworks, making these themes simple to customise and extend.

default theme

This theme combines the navigation for reference documentation and authored guides into a single page side-navigation.

sectionbar theme

This theme separates the reference documentation from the authored guides for a specification, and provides a navigation bar at the top of the screen to allow the user to switch between the guide and reference sections. The page side-navigation provides navigation within the current section.

Downloading a theme

Overtime the DapperDox team and third parties will release additional themes. Once such example is the GOV.UK theme, produced by CompaniesHouse. This is available from their GitHub repository.

Other themes are available, search for dapperdox-theme on GitHub or your favourite search (see Dapperdox themes on GitHub).

Adding new themes

If you are providing your own themes, either created yourself or downloaded, then they should be placed within a common directory and DapperDox configured to look for them there. To do this, pass DapperDox the -theme-dir configuration option.

DapperDox will fall back to its default theme to find any asset files not provided by an imported theme.

For details on using and creating new themes, refer to the section on creating a theme.