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Former Member

Hi,

Following http://scn.sap.com/docs/DOC-48796 it’s time now to focus on upper right corner motion picture...

Let’s see in this document how to create one motion picture and replace standard one by ours. You’ll find 3 files to download for your use (original animated gif and 2 versions of final bmp) in http://www.ge.tt/#!/9M8Y6401 during one month.

Introduction

 

This standard motion picture, called sapalogo.bmp is nothing but a bmp file composed by frames, each one with the same size. This motion picture is included in the file theme.xml. There’s one theme.xml for each of the different themes available. You’ll find themes in

C:\Program Files\SAP\FrontEnd\SAPgui\themes.

Creating

1- Create a folder to work and keep everything at hand, Copy sapalogo.bmp from,for example, C:\Program Files\SAP\FrontEnd\SAPgui\themes\TradeShow to your folder.

2- Look for an animated gif we like in a free to use and download it.

3- We need to extract frames from animated gif into separate bmp files. There’s plenty of free software for this purpose. At the time of writing this document,
I found and used
http://www.evanolds.com/dl/GIFFrame.exe (just run it, don’t install, open animated gif and save frame by frame in the directory we created).

4- Open sapalogo.bmp with paint. We need to check size of each frame. Zoom it to size 300.Click on View tab and tick on rules, gridlines and status bar. We can see that each frame has a length of 123 and height of 60 (first frame ends in 123, second starts in 124 and ends in 245 third starts in 246...and so on). No spaces between frames.

5- Now in another paint session, let’s open each frame from step 3 and save it in bmp format (if your frames don’t have this format yet).

In this session let’s open first frame, click on View tab and tick on rules, gridlines and status bar and zoom to size 300 and overlay this paint session
with first one so we can compare sizes and resize (123x60) our frame.

Once resized, save and repeat steps for rest of frames. Ensure each frame is 123 x 60 exactly.

6- Once finished, don’t close paint, click on new to start the process of joining the frames in a single bmp file.

 

I looked for free software but could find any and as it was a rainy day, I decided to do it manually.

Notice that animated gifs usually have a certain delay between frames. This delay when building the bmp file has to be simulated by adding more frames. In this case each original frame is repeated 5 times in final bmp to give a sense of slow motion.

 

We need to resize the new file length by multiplying 123 x number of frames (in this case 30 frames) keeping height to 60.

And we start pasting from, selecting the frames from our working directory, frame after frame very carefully (from second frame on, once pasted we have to shift it rightwards to its starting position). To help, we can use a excel file to calculate every starting position of next frame.

Replacing

You’ve decided for which theme you want to replace the motion picture and you’ve chosen it as theme in SAP.

Copy our bmp from working directory to

C:\Program Files\SAP\FrontEnd\SAPgui\themes\your-theme-directory\

Edit theme.xml in (select file and click on mouse right button) in

 

C:\Program Files\SAP\FrontEnd\SAPgui\themes\your-theme-directory\

 

And look for AnimationLo and Animation Hi and replace sapalogo.bmp by our bmp (2 replacements) and update size in <right> by the length of our bmp file
(3690).

Save and logon.  Results below:

Using snail2.bmp file.

Using snail3.bmp file, (with a more artistic look).

Enjoy.

Regards,

JM

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