My first project using pd 18 is getting close to finished and it will probably have about 7 or 8 titles in it. Meaning, that many individual projects, each about 8 minutes long, rendered to mpg.

I want to create a disk with a menu having those 7 or 8 rendered files (the whole files, not selected parts of any one of them) as the playable times in a menu.

I've printed out the 32pages of the UG dealing with creating disks, done some experimentation involving importing some of the rendered files onto the disk content panel, choosing a theme, preview et al; and I've figured some things out. But I also have some questions that the UG just doesn't seem to address. This post may be just the start . . .

1. terminology
Root menu - which I understand to be the main menu theme containing the playable options: either individual items or pages for more items or those items on an extra disk (eg, disk 2 of a 3 disk series).
titles/chapters - which in my experience has meant assigning a 'title" (a label?) to a part ("chapter") of a rendered file that is desired for direct access from a menu option.

Q1 - I am getting the impression that although the pd18 terms used are the same, they don't mean the same thing. ??

2. Items in the root menu
Having imported 4 content files and adjusted sequence and the label titles thereof, I went looking for a menu theme. The UG says the root can have many things in it, and I assumed that also meant full clips. but there was no tmeplate that allowed that. Q2 - So, if individual playable items cannot be shown in the root, only in a title or sub-menu, how is the root menu arranged to have a menu item pointing to 'the next page"???

3. Choosing a theme with content labels displayed.
In the menu preferences, the template list looks impressive. But I could not, NOT, find one that listed the title labels for the loaded content.
Example:
chose the "around the world" template.
The root menu did not have any content items in it, just a 'play' item which I interpreted to mean play the whole disk. there are tijmes when that's what you want to do, but frankly I've had more success with setting a menu to play individual items.
But the titles menu for that template looked like it might do. However, there was no way I could get the template selection to move from root to titles. Q3 - How do I do that???

4. Content labels in the menu
Q4 - Prior experience is that the content labels are laoded into the chosen menu theme. But pd18 doesn't do that: so are the loaded content titles labels auto displayed in the titles menu? since I can't find a way to select that (see 3).