Worked Example: Scribus

The AppID of Scribus is ScribusPortable, and so the launcher executable is named ScribusPortable.exe and the launcher configuration file is in App\AppInfo\Launcher\ScribusPortable.ini.

The main Scribus executable to be launched is Scribus.exe, and it lives in App\Scribus. Thus the ProgramExecutable will be Scribus\Scribus.exe.

With a little bit of guesswork and/or looking around, it can be seen that Scribus stores its settings in the filesystem, in the path specified by the environment variable HOME if it is found. This is a “safe” environment variable to set, and so there will be an [Environment] pair HOME=%PAL:DataDir% to get it to store its settings in the Data directory.

In this directory another directory is created, .scribus, and in that a file scribus13.rc which contains the Scribus settings. Among various other settings, an MRU (Most Recently Used) file list is maintained, which (I think) can store paths with a backslash separator and a forward slash separator – so there may be paths in like X:\Documents\... and X:/Documents/.... To update the drive letter in this file is the work of two [FileWriteN] sections (one to do each slash style).

One last thing: Ghostscript is required, and will be included in the App\Ghostscript directory. For Scribus to be able to detect this, it will need to be added with an [Environment] pair.

From the information above, here is a fully functional sample launcher file, configured correctly for Scribus Portable:

[Launch]
ProgramExecutable=Scribus\Scribus.exe
WaitForProgram=false

[FileWrite1]
Type=replace
File=%PAL:DataDir%\.scribus\scribus13.rc
Find=%PAL:LastDrive%\
Replace=%PAL:Drive%\

[FileWrite2]
Type=replace
File=%PAL:DataDir%\.scribus\scribus13.rc
Find=%PAL:LastDrive%/
Replace=%PAL:Drive%/

[Environment]
PATH=%PAL:AppDir%\Ghostscript;%PATH%
HOME=%PAL:DataDir%

To outline what this actually does: it inserts the App\Ghostscript directory into the start of the environment variable PATH, sets the environment variable HOME to the Data directory, updates drive letters in Data\.scribus\scribus13.rc, then runs App\Scribus\Scribus.exe. Without waiting for it (this is because there is nothing which needs tidying up afterwards), the launcher quits.

If Scribus were to change so that any cleanup was needed afterwards, the [Launch]:WaitForProgram line would need to be removed.