First time skinning

Hello...is anybody out there?!?!?

Bump bump? I dunno...have some of your skins...if the ones I'm workin' on are half as good I'll be satisfied.

Bump means I bumped your Thread up so hopefully someone who can help you, will help you...
And thanks for the compliment....lets try to bump it again.

Can anyone help here? this has been up for over a week now!

For rainlendar support, I'd go to their forums: WWW Link

thanks zubaz

Yuppers...they have a really good tutorial there.

I guess my reply wasn't posted 'cause I don't see it. Anyway thanks a bunch. Visited the rainlendar site and viewed the tutorials but found no answer to my question. What I did come away with was Rainlendar 2.0 lite. It's the freebie version and I thought I'd check it out before going for the pro. What I am going to do is find one of the skins I have and play with the ini files. That'll show me what I want...I hope. I really appreciate the help and am looking forward eagerly to seeing more of your stuff and with luck...maybe see one of mine up there.

Uvah..

First of all...what buttons do you want to put a font onto?

second: Bitmap margins are the margins for bitmap scaling of your image where the text margins are how far/close to the edges of the bitmap you want your text to be.

Those numbers after the days font are: (direct quote from the manual) " fonts are defined with 13 values and the name of the font all separeted with"/"-char. The most important values are the first one which defines the height of the font and the last, which is the typeface name of the font. the height of the font is defined in logical size and NOT in point size.

eg: -17/0/0/0/700/0/0/0/0/3/2/1/34/Arial

The different values are in order:

height of font
average character width
angle of escapement
base line orientation angle
font weight
italic attribute option
underline attribute option
strikeout sttribute option
character set identifier (this is always DEFAULT-CHARSET unless UseSkinCharSet is set to 1)
output precision
clipping precision
output quality
pitch and family
typeface name

All this information and much, much more if found in the manual available for download at the Rainlendar site: http://ipi.fi/~rainy/Rainlendar/Manual.html

Thanks Boopish...the buttons are ToDo, Event and Message Box. I had no idea it consisted of so much information. Question...base line orientation angle...can the font be set to an angle other than the norm? Example...instead of standard ninety degrees left to right...can it be set to say forty five degrees bottom left to top right or vice versa? Getting curious now. The logical size... is that or can it be defined by the number of pixels in the image. If I have a box 17 pixels high and ten wide the logical size could be 15 with one pixel top and bottom? At any rate...I'm close to finishing the wall and hope to upload a screenshot within the next few weeks. I can't wait for you guys to see it. Thank you so much for all your help.

Uvah..you're welcome. You put the fonts onto the buttons when you make them...or you can add a design. Open up a few of the skins to get the idea (just go into your Rainy directory, open up a skin and have a look at the images.)

I have no idea about the angles..hehehe...I just concentrate on the font name and size, myself.

Thanks Boopish. This skinning thing has got me good. My wall is nearly finished. One thing that might be a problem is I think my smx is a bit large. Takes one (or nearly) third of my desktop. When the screenshot is ready I'll let the experts judge for themselves. Happy skinning

Visited the rainlendar site and viewed the tutorials but found no answer to my question. What I did come away with was Rainlendar 2.0 lite.

I'm a bit confused on the Rainlendar 2.0 myself - it has no ini file and doesn't appear skinnable at this point. I really haven't looked at it in depth at the moment. But I noticed when I installed the 2.0 version all my previous skins didn't work anymore. I uninstalled the 2,0 and put back the previous version. I notice the Rainy site lists the previous version right along with 2.0 . Am I wrong in thinking the 2.0 is not skinnable ? Or are they trying to get me to buy the Pro version ? Which is no problem if thats where the secrets lie .......

The new rainlendar is somewhat different. I haven't gone in depth to it yet but I believe it deals not with ini files but with html's. How this is different has yet to be discovered. The lite version doesn't seem to have all of the same capabilities as the pro version though. The main difference there I believe is of course the "free" version and the pro comes with all the bells and whistles. The one thing I did do is to keep the old and have 2.0 installed as a separate app. The new one will take some getting used to. Before you buy it they'll allow a trial period. Do that and compare.

Correction to my last post. Went into rainlendar 2.0 and did a little digging. It has a new file extension....r2skin...a renamed zip...There's one skin, shadow4, I unzipped it and got the following. Three folders (images, scripts and docs), the images folder has the skin components, buttons todo items etc., the scripts folder is empty and inside the docs folder is twelve xml's, not html's like I stated earlier...duh...They are...Alarm, calendar,digiclock,dual calendar,elements, eventlist, languages, sidebar,
todolist, tooltip,vertical calendar and year calendar. A bit more complex than a simple ini. They'll open with your browser and there is a skin xml along with the three folders. This one I think is like the ini. You'll have to open that one as an explanation would take too long. Suffice it to say that it is very different. There is a lot more to it than a regular ini has. Mine is the lite version...I can only imagine what the pro looks like.

.r2skin...a renamed zip.

Yeah, I'd already unzipped one of the rainies when I had the 2.0 installed. Thats why I said it looked unskinnable at the moment. Looks just way too complicated to bother with.

Fairyy~ But I noticed when I installed the 2.0 version all my previous skins didn't work anymore

Had the same happen to me but I waited a month reinstalled Rainy 2 and now all the skins work perfectly, even ones from 2001


It's My Secret

My Secret:Had the same happen to me but I waited a month reinstalled Rainy 2 and now all the skins work perfectly, even ones from 2001

How did you do the install? Did you install separately or over old version and let it import the old skins and info?

I moved my skins last time because I was afraid of losing work I was saving - then transferred it back.

Im curious if letting it import previous skins made a difference or if they fixed something else.

The install package is similar to the old version. I simply clicked on it and it installed automatically. Had no need to do it over the original as it is a separate install. In other words it does not overwrite the old one. Keep the old and just install as you normally would. You should have them both...I do. I didn't import any skins as yet. Don't know if they'll work. I just called up Rainlendar2 and now have both on desktop. How do you import skins from old one?

Oooops...sorry. I thought you were asking me.

How do you import skins from old one?

During the install at the end it asked me - but I clicked it off cos I had moved all my skins. But when I transferred them to the new 2.0 skin folder - none of the skins worked. 'My Secret' was saying that happened to her also but it was ok when she downloaded it later.

Fairyy~ the first time I had installed with the old version intact, it didn't load any of my old skins. I immediately uninstalled both, cleaned the registry with JV16 Power tools which removed some *old registry keys also did a *deep clean and still found 3 old reg keys, deleted all & rebooted and installed Rainy 2 fresh, no skins worked. Re downloaded a fresh Rainy 2 a month later, old version still uninstalled. I simply copied all of the rainy skins to the new folder, making sure Rainlendar was not running and all the skins worked. Have since formated my harddrive and Rainy 2 is installed and working perfectly.
To me it seems like the First Rainy2 was a beta and had been fixed.

I keep a copy of all skins for all programs on an external drive and just copy to appropriate folder when reinstalling any programs. It seems to be the *safest way to do it. And will now always uninstall the old version first

It's My Secret

Fairyy~ the first time I had installed with the old version intact, it didn't load any of my old skins. I immediately uninstalled both, cleaned the registry with JV16 Power tools which removed some *old registry keys also did a *deep clean and still found 3 old reg keys, deleted all & rebooted and installed Rainy 2 fresh, no skins worked. Re downloaded a fresh Rainy 2 a month later, old version still uninstalled. I simply copied all of the rainy skins to the new folder, making sure Rainlendar was not running and all the skins worked. Have since formated my harddrive and Rainy 2 is installed and working perfectly. To me it seems like the First Rainy2 was a beta and had been fixed. I keep a copy of all skins for all programs on an external drive and just copy to appropriate folder when reinstalling any programs. It seems to be the *safest way to do it. And will now always uninstall the old version first It's My Secret

Ok..gotcha ...I'll try again later - I keep all my skins on disks anyway...
Not really impressed with Rainy2 - I prefer to just use widgets at this point.

Hey folks...just read It's My Secret's post...I copied two skins to rainy 2.0 out of curiosity. Clicked on calendars and they don't show up although the details of each are listed when I go to the options dialogue. I'm gonna do what you guys did and uninstall the one I have and then redownload. Cloud be that it was a beta. I'll let you know.