I have spent countless hours customizing a PCF I downloaded from this site for my system. I am alomst done. But while working on it tonight I started the emulator to take screenshots of a couple pages for use in creating some "ghosted" versions of some of my screens. All of a sudden I noticed that, when displayed on the emulator, the top of the main page of each device, which used to show the battery level, time, and date, now showed black splotches where those used to be. I didn't do anything to those pages to make that happen, and previously they had always displayed correctly in the emulator. What could have happened? More importantly, how can I fix it?

I checked the FAQ and saw the entry that says to let the battery level indicator, etc, show through on a custom CCF, you must make it transparent. As it turns out, I think the "pictures" of these indicators that had previously been displaying in PENG were just part of the bitmap on which my pages were based, i.e., when loaded on the Pronto, they were static and were not really letting the actual indicators show through. So in addition to wondering what happened to my pages in PENG to make them show black splotches, I also need to know how to make the top few lines of my page "template" transparent (using Photoshop elements).

I hope this is making sense. I would post the screenshots into this message but can't figure out how to do so. If anyone can clue me in I will do so.

Thanks for any help you can provide.

There used to a problem where PCFs would become corrupt during editing, usually after long sessions. Where you see black bits, this means the image file is missing from the PCF. You would notice that the PCF size has dropped considerably.

If you are using the latest version of the editor, then this problem has largely gone away but still does happen sometimes.

The lesson is save often, and to different file names. Get out of the editor every now and again as well.

Um, yikes. I had left the editor open for days and days cause I leave my computer on and I would just work on it when I'd get home at night. I saved often, but not to different file names - never occurred to me that that would be necessary. (Plus, doesn't it save the file when you run the emulator?) Does anyone know a way to revert to an old version of saved file? I imagine there is none. >:(

I am not at home so I can't check the file sizes, but the black bits show only where a few small graphics would have been, so I don't imagine losing them would affect the file size much, unless I'm misunderstanding something. If I can replace those images, would that fix the problem, or would I still need to be concerned about some underlying corruption in the PCF? If corruption remains a concern and I have to start over (ugh!!) would it be safe to do so by creating a new PCF but then just grouping all the buttons on a page and copying and pasting them into equivalent devices/pages in the new PCF? This would be much faster than recreating the entire layout.

Somebody please tell me I am not completely screwed!

Arguably, if you were to remove everything from the system page and then merge with a new, blank config, you'll get your system page and graphics back.

RC - Thanks for the tip. As I am merely tweaking an existing file and haven't learned all the new features in PENG versus the original ProntoEdit, I wasn't even aware of the System page. I tried your idea, though, and it worked. Thank you!