
robert.mcnamara at gmail
Sep 10, 2009, 1:27 PM
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Hi Themers, To add to some of the links I posted a couple of months back, I wanted to address some of the more basic issues-- where do graphics in Myth Themes come from? Well, really, you can use anything, but I know all of us (that I know personally) working on MythUI themes use Inkscape. Inkscape is the "open source Illustrator," it's linux' full featured vector editing software. The great advantage of using Inkscape is that you can create a document at the resolution of your theme and use it as a "crib note" to do the layout in the XML. Here's what I generally use as a workflow: 1) Create a document and implement all of the widgets visually. 2) Create a second document for a myth theme screen. Change the document properties to the native resolution of your theme, and go to town. 3) Once you have your screen laid out, you can export each element as an image. What's even more helpful is you can use Inkscape's coordinate system to accurately fill in the <area> and <position> tags in MythUI. One note of caution: Inkscape's 0,0 origin is in the bottom left-- ours is in the top left. So the "Y" values are less helpful, but you can still get them by selecting an object, and adding the "Inkscape Y Value" to the object's height, and subtracting that total from the height of your document. So: Inkscape reports Y = 430 Item = 30 pixel tall Document = 720 pixels tall 720-(430+30) = 260 in Myth value If you've never used inkscape, try these video tutorials. They are awesome and you can create some complicated effects very quickly. http://screencasters.heathenx.org/ If you have any questions, feel free to ask here, or even better, join us in #mythtv-theming on irc.freenode.net. Robert _______________________________________________ mythtv-theming mailing list mythtv-theming[at]mythtv.org http://mythtv.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/mythtv-theming
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