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Tech Support recently had someone ask if there was a way to use custom navigation buttons in Camtasia Studio MenuMaker. The customer asked, "Is there a way to produce custom buttons in MenuMaker? I see there is a file containing .cmmbtn files, so how can I produce one of these myself? I'd really like to use text - rather than arrows - for navigation."

I thought the rest of you might be interested in this as well, so I bugged one of the developers, David Cheng, to make a screencast about it.

David said, "Keep in mind that these techniques are not officially supported. I'll try to help you as much as possible, but it may not work as well as you like." So, you've been warned!

If you're feeling adventurous, David has written a tutorial (see below). And, click on the screenshot below to watch his screencast:

Each cmmbtn file is a zip archive containing the following files:

• button.xml
• normal graphic
• mouse-over graphic
• pressed graphic

All the graphics are the PNG file format.

In order to make your own custom cmmbtn files, there are two major steps:

1. Preparing the PNG files
2. Creating the cmmbtn file

Preparing the PNG file
There are 3 PNGs that represent the look of the button, depending on the mouse activity above the cursor. All three files must have the same dimensions, as well as an alpha mask. The clickable region of the button is defined by the alpha mask. I don't have much experience with the creation of 32-bit PNG files with alpha masks, but I imagine you'd create them with something like Photoshop or Paint Shop Pro.

You'll note that all the buttons we included are grayscale. This is so we can colorize them based on the template that is chosen. When you create your own buttons, you can create whatever colors you'd like and just choose not to colorize them in the button options.

Creating the cmmbtn file
Here are the steps you can take to create the actual button archive:

1. Go to the Media\MenuMaker\Buttons folder and make a copy of one of the .cmmbtn files. Call it "My Button.cmmbtn".
2. Rename it to "My Button.cmmbtn.zip" and extract the files.
3. Open the button.xml file in a text editor
4. Change the <FileNormal>, <FileHover> and <FilePressed> takes to refer to your png files. The other tags aren't really used.
5. Modify the GUID to something else random. Each button has to have a unique GUID, so just change any of the numbers to another hexadecimal digit (0-9, a-f).
6. Remove the .zip extension from "My Button.cmmbtn.zip", make sure it's in your Media\Menumaker\Buttons folder, and the new button should show up in the buttons dialog! The name it will take will be "My Button" or whatever you name the cmmbtn file to.

Anyone doing this? I'd be interested to hear. Also, is this something you'd like to easily do in future releases of Camtasia Studio?