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Menu Customization in IntelliCAD

Peter Coburn, Chris Ainsworth & Lisa Preston

IntelliCAD 98 allows menus to be customized and used immediately. A customised menu is a great way to add your own special commands and shortcuts to a menu to enable you to work faster or more efficiently.

The Menu tab of the IntelliCAD98 Customize command allows the user to create or modify existing menu items by either inserting new menu items, sub-menu items, deleting or renaming existing items.

To create a new pulldown menu in IntelliCAD, select Tools > Customize then the menu tab.

To add a new pulldown menu to an existing menu structure simply highlight the existing menu heading (i.e. &Help) that you wish to have the new menu item inserted ahead of and click the Insert… button. An empty edit box appears in this place and you are now required to type the menu header description. If you wish to utilise mnemonics, an ampersand (&) must be placed before the shortcut letter, i.e. F&avourites will place an underscore character under the letter a so that the menu item will appear as Favourites. This will then enable use of the ALT+A keyboard combination to active this pulldown menu. The same applies for sub-menu items, i.e. ALT+V+Z+W will activate the Zoom Window command from the View pulldown menu.

To add your own menu item under this new header, click on the new menu item that you added above, and from the Insert... click on Menu Sub-Item and an empty edit box appears in a sub-branch. You are now required to type the menu item description, with a mnemonic if required.

Two edit boxes will now be available, just above the OK button. You enter the command line instructions for your menu item in this Command edit box. Alternatively, the required command can be selected in the Available Commands list and once selected, click the Add Command button and the command string will be added to this edit box.

Finally add the "Help String" to the next edit box. If you wish to add you own commands or LISP functions to the command edit box don’t forget to add the ^C^C^C prefix to the command, so that they previous command is cancelled.

Importing Menu Files

IntelliCAD supports the loading of partial menu files. So if you have a favourite menu structure that you wish to import from AutoCAD, you can import this menu containing your customisation and still maintain the default IntelliCAD as the ‘front end’. You may need to edit this *.MNU file as it may still contain some of the AutoCAD ‘front end’, which, although, will almost certainly work inside IntelliCAD will not be required. Our suggestion is that you open this Menu file with a text editor, copy and paste your customisation into a new file and Save As yourname.mnu.

The Menu tab of the IntelliCAD98 Customize command allows the user to Import… an existing menu. Click on Import… and check the ‘Append to existing menu’ option and select the yourname.mnu file. The new pulldown menu structure will now be added to the Menu Tree.

Clicking the Close button IntelliCAD will write the new definitions into the Windows registry.

To revert back to the default IntelliCAD Menu structure simply click on the Reset button.

After your pulldown menu items have been created, customised or appended to your liking, select the Close button. Clicking on the Close button IntelliCAD will write the new definitions into the Windows registry. The changes will be active immediately the Customize command has been Closed.

As the definition of the new menu structure are saved in the Windows Registry, you will need to Export these changes to a saved file for transport to another installation or prior to an upgrade. Once transported or the upgrade is complete then Import this file using the Import feature.

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