Step 4 - The Menu Body
- Now open The Menu Button dialog. Set the button metrics at a height of 18 and a min/max
width of about 120/200. This should give enough width to cater for most descriptions to
be shown in full. Once again, check the 'Use Inactive' box. In our case we will only actually
have one image (buttona) for the active state - BUT, instead we will use a different colour text for each state
(which match the two greys in the title bar - subtle and less distracting).
- Set the text offsets to 24 and -1, the font to tahoma 8pt, and the colours to match the titlebar
(dark grey and slightly lighter grey). We'll left justify the text and once again set it to lower case. The text is offset by 24 so that it starts to the left of the grille design on the button image.
For this theme (as I do for most of my themes) I'll be setting the icons to 'none'. Obviously this is
a personal choice, so try the menus with and without icons and play about with the offset values until you are happy with the result.
If you expect to be showing icons in your design, it's probably wise to design a button height of about 20 pixels minimum.
- The active and inactive menu backgrounds should be set to 'bitmap' (as we are not using transparency in
the main body of the menu), 'tile' and 'to menu' should be unchecked, and L.tile / R.tile
set to 22 (the screenshot shows the 'active' version of the button).
(Note - the 'to menu' box is used to stretch a buttona/buttoni image over the whole height of
a menu. You can see this use in my 'Sincere' and 'find it' themes. If you use this technique, make sure
that your buttona/buttoni image is suitable for stretching vertically!)
- We can ignore the colour pickers
for the menus as we are using bitmaps. Again, the button frames should be set to
'none' for both states. Finally, the arrow offsets should be set. This may take a little trial and error
to get the menu arrow in exactly the right position. Under normal circumstances, with the offsets set to 0,
the 16x16 arrowa/arrowi icon will appear centred vertically on the button, 4 pixels in from the right edge. I created
my icon from that particular area in my template, so the offsets should be ok at 0.
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