Creating Menus: Inkscape vs Gimp

Most of the tutorials on creating DVD-Video menus seem to involve Gimp 
(or Photoshop). However, I don’t think these are the best sort of tool. 
What you need is a drawing-oriented tool, which provides functions like 
aligning a row of objects to a margin, or distributing them so they are 
spaced out equally, so that you don’t have to tweak these sorts of 
things by eye. And by working in terms of objects rather than pixels, it 
makes it easier to go back and make changes, adjust positions, sizes, 
fonts etc.

In short, I think you should be using a tool like Inkscape.

Another important advantage of Inkscape is that it uses SVG as its 
document format, which is fairly straightforward for other tools to 
process. And it lets you attach additional information to objects in the 
drawing, like object names and description text.

I’ve been working on a GUI tool that takes an Inkscape drawing as a 
starting point, lets you choose additional colours for showing buttons 
in their “highlighted” and “selected” states, and then outputs the 
results as three separate PNG files showing the buttons in their 
different states, together with an XML file that spumux can use to 
generate the menu from these images.

I depend on Inkscape to do as much of the work as possible. Not only 
does it create the menu image with the buttons in their “normal” 
colours, I also use it to define an additional layer in the drawing the 
sole purpose of which is to contain the button bounds rectangles, 
together with their names and other information. Makes it easy for you 
to ensure they’re properly positioned at the design phase, and it’s 
another function I don’t have to provide. :)

Anyway, I successfully used the tool to generate its first working menu 
today. I think I should write up some documentation before making it 
public. Let me know if anybody is interested in using it.

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