Skin Design - Menus & Submenus

[kiddac]

I am currently experimenting with the design of a new TIVO style skin as an alternative to the existing tivo/virgin style skins that already exist. I have run into a bit of a problem that I am hoping some of the brains on here will be able to help with.

In most modern interfaces, menus and sub menus are shown side by side. As shown below

maxresdefault (1).jpg

When I am scrolling down the left menu, I am hoping to show it's sub menu on the right, just as a text list.

I can achieve this by using multiple FixedLabel fields for every menu entry but it is going to end up a massive bit of code

<widget source="menu" render="FixedLabel" text="textgoeshere" position="65,100" size="128,128">
<convert type="MenuEntryCompare">about_screen</convert>
<convert type="ConditionalShowHide" />
</widget>

I also tried having multiple text on the same line and splitting with \n newline. But I have no control over linespacing so that is a problem.

Is there a quicker and easier solution that brings in these sub menus values as a list, possible from the existing data already in menu.xml, or by referencing a new custom xml file.

If this is not easily achievable is it possible to instead use the MenuEntryCompare as above but conditional show/hide a panel of data instead.

I am knowledgeable in skin designing, but have very limited knowledge of python code.

Any help with this task would be much appreciated.

Thank You.