PortableApps (R34 Mod)
Menu Modification Tutorial

Please note (again) that the Mod menus are not officially supported on PortableApps.com or in the PortableApps.com forums. Even so, there are plenty of knowledgeable fans who are willing to help with questions.

In Part 1 of this tutorial, we learned ways we can change the Autorun.inf and the Locale files to customize the PortableApps R34 Mod Menu appearance.

Part 2 of the tutorial gave us a look at some of the other files that come with the R34 Mod Menu.

Now in Part 3, we get to actually play with settings contained in the R34 Mod Menu theme.ini file. We will look at ways to affect the appearance of the R34 Mod Menu main window - the area that holds the application list and the categories you've created.

In many places in the theme.ini, you will see various items that can be set to zero (which is off/disabled) or one (on/enabled).

Remember that lines that start with a semi-colon are comments and do not affect the theme. Sometimes, when things are more complicated than zero or one, I will copy a section of the theme.ini file, add it back in, and comment the original lines. Then I can make changes to the new lines to see what happens, and I'm always sure I can return to the original by deleting the new lines and un-commenting the original lines.

Other times, I'll just make a copy of the entire theme.ini file to save, I can play all I want, and just restore the copy to return to my original settings.

When you make modifications in the R34 Mod Menu theme.ini file, you will be able to see the actual changes in your own menu if you switch to a different theme (that has its own theme.ini such as Default), and then back to the Tutorial theme. If that doesn't work, you can quit the R34 Mod Menu and re-start. That will force the system to refresh.

One thing that bothers me about some themes (including the Default theme) is the amout of the indent when a folder or sub-folder opens. The difference just isn't enough for me to see easily. Why don't we fix the indent?

Go to the Tutorial theme and open the theme.ini file in your favorite text editor. Scroll down to find the section heading [MenuButtons] and look for the item SubItemOffset=. The screen capture below shows changes between settings of the default of 10, then indent 20 and finally 30. Pick whichever pleases your eye.

You can play with the rest of the [MenuButton] settings in the same manner, including Bold, Italic, Underline and Strikeout. You can also specify the FontColor using RGB values.

There's also a section heading for [OpenMenuButtons], which has the same settings (minus the SubMenuOffset) as [MenuButtons], but it controls the appearance for the open buttons instead of the closed ones only.

So why don't we make things radical, just for the sake of experimentation? We could make the regular button text BLUE (set the FontColorB=255) and the open button text RED (set the FontColorR=255), italic, and underlined.

The last thing to talk about is "FontName=Tahoma". You can modify this setting as many times as you like and there will be absolutely NO effect. That's because this item should be "Font" not "FontName". If you absolutely must have Courier, you will have to change the line to read: "Font=Courier".

Be sure to also edit the item name in the R34 Mod Menu's Default theme from "FontName=Tahoma" to "Font=Tahoma". That way, you can switch themes to get back to Tahoma. Further, other themes without their own theme.ini won't run into problems having their font set incorrectly. Otherwise, you'd have to quit the R34 Mod Menu entirely and re-start to get a refresh.

There are actually three sections where you need to fix the "FontName" error:

• [AppButtons]
• [MenuButtons]
• [OpenMenuButtons]

Speaking of [AppButtons], this section heading affects the appearance of the applications listed in the R34 Mod Menu just like the [MenuButtons] and [OpenMenuButtons] control the appearance of the category folders. We see many of the same settings in this section, such as the font, font colors, bold, italic, underline and so on. There are a few new settings here:

• Height=20
• This setting controls the line height within the R34 Mod Menu.
• Smaller numbers will scrunch the list together.
• Larger ones will make the list look double-spaced.
• Width=240
• When you mouse-over the application list, you'll see a sort-of three-D highlight border. This setting controls the width of that highlight.
• TransparentColorR=255
• TransparentColorG=255
• TransparentColorB=255
• These three control the color transparency around the application icons. Setting all three to 255 will usually work to minimize the "blocky" white square around the icons that shows when the background is dark. Some themes seem to put these as 206 or zero.
• OffsetX=0
• OffsetY=0
• These two control where the menu list appears in theme's main window.
• Increasing the OffsetX will move the menu list away from the left edge to show a larger left margin.
• Increasing the OffsetY will move the menu list away from the top edge of the window to give a larger top margin.
• Please note that if you increase the OffsetX, you'll have to decrease the Width setting (above), or the highlight will extend out of the main menu window.
• ListSize=20
• This is the number of entries in the menu list, from top to bottom.
• Shorter (compact) themes need to have this set to a smaller number.
• Standard sized themes usually use 20.
• If the font or the line height has been changed, this number may have to be adjusted.

That's it for this section of the tutorial.

Click here for the first section where we looked at the Autorun.inf and Locale files.
Click here for the second section where we looked at the different directories and menu files.

In the next section where we'll take a look at more theme.ini changes.