Branding

This article describes the Branding of FreeCAD. Branding means to start your own application on base of FreeCAD. That can be only your own executable or splash screen till a complete reworked program. On base of the flexible architecture of FreeCAD it's easy to use it as base for your own special purpose program.

General
Most of the branding is done in the MainCmd.cpp or MainGui.cpp. These Projects generate the executable files of FreeCAD. To make your own Brand just copy the Main or MainGui projects and give the executable an own name, e.g. FooApp.exe. The most important settings for a new look can be made in one place in the main function. Here is the code section that controls the branding:

The first Config entry defines the program name. This is not the executable name, which can be changed by renaming or by compiler settings, but the name that is displayed in the task bar on windows or in the program list on Unix systems.

The next lines define the Config entries of your FooApp Application. A description of the Config and its entries you find in Start up and Configuration.

Images
Image resources are compiled into FreeCAD using Qt's resource system. Therefore you have to write a .qrc file, an XML-based file format that lists image files on the disk but also any other kind of resource files. To load the compiled resources inside the application you have to add a line

Q_INIT_RESOURCE(FooApp);

into the main function. Alternatively, if you have an image in XPM format you can directly include it into your main.cpp and add the following line to register it:

Gui::BitmapFactory.addXPM("FooAppSplasher", ( const char** ) splash_screen);

Branding XML
In FreeCAD there is also a method supported without writing a customized main function. For this method you must write a file name called branding.xml and put it into the installation directory of FreeCAD. Here is an example with all supported tags:

  FooApp Foo App in title bar 1 0 1234 2014/1/1 (c) My copyright <MaintainerUrl>Foo App URL</MaintainerUrl> <ProgramLogo>Path to logo (appears in bottom right corner)</ProgramLogo> <WindowIcon>Path to icon file</WindowIcon> <ProgramIcons>Path to program icons</ProgramIcons> <SplashScreen>splashscreen.png</SplashScreen> <SplashAlignment>Bottom|Left</SplashAlignment> <SplashTextColor>#ffffff</SplashTextColor> <SplashInfoColor>#c8c8c8</SplashInfoColor> <StartWorkbench>PartDesignWorkbench</StartWorkbench> </Branding>

All of the listed tags are optional.