Excel screenshot? I'm not sure I follow. I don't see how that gets the text onto the buttons. Especially in the different text sizes that I'm hoping for. I want the key number and key name to be there, but de-emphasized.
I probably should have gone ahead and included a picture of the layout I have on my DX1:
I used this photo as the background layer, to arrange and align the buttons. After I have that, I hide this photo layer. The layout picture here is one I created in Gimp. (Gawd, that was an awful experience. The Gimp developers do *not* think like I do.)
Originally, I was going to print out that layout and slide it under the clear plastic under the keys, which is why the labels are beside the keys and not on top of them. I've decided since then that I don't like that. I just bring up the picture on my second monitor before I fire up the game.
As you can see, the buttons are not necessarily orthogonal.
Here's what I have at the moment as a new button blank:
Yeah, I know, not all that pretty. Have you ever heard the term Programmer Art?
If I'm not going to rotate the buttons and text to match the actual layout of the keys, then I might as well just slap the labels on within PDN. I don't see how the Excel step helps me.
But maybe I'm missing something?
On the programming front, I glanced at CodeLab. But, it's a fairly constrained environment. I think it's going to be easier to just take a Java or C# example and read a CSV file of text labels, to spit out the button files. I may even build a text file of x,y,rotation values and build the entire layout image programatically.
Drake