The information in this article applies to:

• NetNewsWire 2.x
• NetNewsWire Lite 2.x

The appearance of news item descriptions is very customizable. NetNewsWire includes a number of styles, and you can create your own.

Built-in styles:
In the bottom right corner of the newsreader window is a styles popup menu. (If you haven’t changed it, it probably says “Default”) Choose an item from that menu to change how the description pane looks.

The Default style is fairly basic; most of the others are more visually interesting. Most of them were created by NetNewsWire testers.

Here’s an example using the BeBox style (by Noah Mittman):

Here’s the same news item using a different style, Ripples Moss (by Bryan Bell):

The styles are most distinct if you’re using the traditional or widescreen views, since there’s less to style in the Combined View.

Installing other styles:
If you download a style from the web or other place, you can install it by double-clicking on it. A window opens in NetNewsWire telling you about the style (who made it, most importantly). If you already have a style with that name, NetNewsWire gives you the choice to overwrite it or not.

Finding more styles:
See our Styles page on the web for links to more styles.

How to create your own styles:
These styles are defined by Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) files.

The files are stored at ~/Library/Application Support/NetNewsWire/StyleSheets/. You can put your own style sheets in that folder and then choose them from the Style popup menu.

One easy way to get started is to copy one of the existing files and make changes. This will give you an idea of how the HTML in the description pane is structured.

You can get the source of the description pane, too: ctrl-click on it and choose Copy HTML Source from the contextual menu. You can then paste the source into a text document in your favorite editor.

Styles are files that end with the suffix .nnwstyle. These files are actually folders—in the Finder, ctrl-click on the file and choose Show Package Contents.

A style should have at least two files inside it:

• stylesheet.css: the actual style sheet.
• Info.plist: information about the style in Apple’s property list format.

Here are the keys that should appear in Info.plist:

• CreatorHomePage: the URL of a page talking about the style, or the URL of a weblog or other page by the creator of the style.
• CreatorName: the name of the person or organization who created the style.
• Version: a number—such as 1, 2, 3, and so on—identifying the version of the style. These should be integers.

Styles may also contain graphics that a style sheet might use.

If you distribute your style on the web so that other people may use it, please send an email to support@newsgator.com  letting us know about it. Thanks!