Theme overwrites item text labels

fausseplanete wrote on 11/21/2008, 12:48 PM
I produced a version 1 DVD with buttons arranged in a specific fashion for its Scene Selection menu that spreads over three pages. From page 1 I then exported its scene select menu as a user-theme.

Now I wanted to create a version 2 DVD having different media but same button appearance and layout. So I create a new DVDA project, load in the new media file (and chapter markers), get it to make a scene selection menu which once again spreads over three pages.

Now I drag the user-theme I created over page 1 and it looks ok. I try the same thing with page 2 and .. to my horror the items end up with the same text labels as page 1. It seems the theme has not only changed the general appearance like I wanted but also it has overwritten the text labels. This is not like a Style Sheet concept in a word processing application etc.

This surely limits the usefulness of the Themes concept, or is there some trick I am missing?

In the hope of a work-around, even if a cumbersome one, I read up on Themes, unzipped mine and edited the XML. I tried deleting the <TEXT>...</TEXT> entries in the XML file, where the text labels are defined. I saved it (and the other 2 files associated with it to a zip archive renamed to have a ".thm" extension. Instead of leaving the text alone as I hoped, it had the effect of making all the item text labels blank.

Is there any solution to this? Maybe it's better not to use Themes at all and just resize and reposition the buttons every time I make a new version of the same DVD? Ideally want a dialog when applying Themes to allow enable/disable (check-box) of each kind of thing the theme, to overwrite or leave alone each corresponding thing in the current DVDA project.

The following thread from a previous year seems related:
http://www.sonycreativesoftware.com/forums/ShowMessage.asp?ForumID=22&MessageID=525040

Comments

bStro wrote on 11/21/2008, 1:59 PM
When you export a menu as theme, there are two types of themes available: Grid and Positional. You can find out more about each type by checking the manual / online help for "Exporting a Menu as a Theme." At any rate, the Positional themes save your buttons exactly as they are -- where they are, and what they say. Grid themes do not store this information.

Rob
fausseplanete wrote on 11/22/2008, 5:38 AM
Rob,

Thanks for that advice, which has got me maybe 90% to where I wanted to be.

I tried export menu as a theme > Advanced > GridI as you advised, then a tree of options became non-greyed, which was at first encouraging. I confirmed the effect of "Grid" by checking the theme dialog's "Preview" option. The buttons reverted to their default grid sizes and positions (hence the name "Grid" I guess. A shame, since I wanted to retain size and position. But by playing with the various margin, size and gap parameters while in "Preview" mode, I pretty-much approximated what I wanted.

Next, I imported the grid theme to a new menu, and hurray, it didn't alter the text.

So it's mostly there, just a shame it's not more obvious and doesn't permit independent selection of what the theme defines, only between higher-level "packages" of "positional" and "Grid". Independent feature selection should in any case be done at use-time not define-time.

Thanks once again.