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Custom Skins doesn't work with layout

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EB_Troller
Posts: 12
Joined: June 10th, 2018, 4:28 am

Re: Custom Skins doesn't work with layout

Post by EB_Troller »

jsmorley wrote:This should be corrected for the next beta. Rainmeter.ini will be encoded as UTF-16 LE when created on a new Rainmeter installation. In order to address upgrade installs for existing users, it is our intent to have Rainmeter check the encoding of Rainmeter.ini on each start of Rainmeter and / or Refresh All, and change the encoding to UTF-16 LE if needed. This should allow for Unicode characters anywhere in the path to skins. Existing saved Layouts, or Layouts loaded from a downloaded .rmskin, will be converted if needed when they are loaded and become the active Rainmeter.ini. Layouts will of course be UTF-16 LE when they are created or re-saved.

It should be noted that this is going to have a minor backwards compatibility issue that we can't avoid. If you are using WebParser to "read" Rainmeter.ini, perhaps to check the "Active" status of a config, you will have to add CodePage=1200 to the parent WebParser measure to properly read the UTF-16 LE encoded file. If you are using Lua to read the file, you just won't be able to. You will have to read the entire file in with WebParser, and pass the result to Lua in order to do whatever value-added stuff you want.

If you are doing either of these things in a skin today, now might be the time to address this in anticipation of the next beta, and a likely final release in the near future.

One other note based on this conversation, you will NEVER be able to use [SomeText] with brackets in the path to Rainmeter skins. The [SomeText] construct is just fraught with meaning in Rainmeter, not the least in Rainmeter.ini, and it can only lead to tears. Never, ever use that.

As a general rule, the paths under ..Rainmeter\Skins that comprise the "config name" of a skin should just use alphabetic/numeric characters in any language, no spaces, and no punctuation or symbols. I actually sometimes use symbols like @ or ! at the beginning of a config name folder to either make them stand out in my long list of skins, or to impact how they are sorted, and that is ok, but do be careful. Characters like spaces, or # or [] or () in a config name can cause head-scratching when the config name is referenced in code.

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The @ character makes my "working / testing" config I use all the time sort to the top.
Thanks :)
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