Customising the Toolbars

This Tech Tip explains how to use the Toolbar Editor.

The Toolbars in AllyCAD 2011 can be customised to suite a users' specific work environment.

Opening the Toolbar Editor

Start Button › All Programs › AllyCAD 2011 › Tools › Toolbar Editor

The new Toolbar Editor

Customising a Toolbar

We are going to add a toolbar called "My Tools", and the add icons to run a CAD function.

File Menu › Open

The Toolbar Editor open dialog appears, select the cad.tbr file, and then click on the Open button

The toolbar file will be opened in the editor.

Once we have opened the default toolbar file, we will save the file to the user folder, this will prevent the file being overwritten when any updates are released.

File Menu › Save As

Click on the Open Local user Folder Location button, the menu file MUST be called CAD (same name as the original menu file), and then click Save

Adding a new Toolbar

To add the new "My Tools" menu item, we click on the Edit Menu › Add

There are two options available. We will be adding a new toolbar, so we select Yes.

The Toolbar Name dialog will appear, type in the name of the new tool bar, then click OK to continue.

Our new toolbar will be called My Tools

The new My Tools toolbar will be added, with a default button called UNKNOWN. Select the UNKNOWN item on the list.

Select an image to be used for the new button. Clicking on the drop down will list the default images included with AllyCAD.

The Open dialog will open, you can then browse to a folder that contains icons that have been previously created.

Note:

User-defined images must be supplied as .ico (icon) files in True Colour + Alpha Channel (32 bit) format. The icon file must contain two icons, the first being 16 pixels wide by 16 pixels high, and the second 24 pixels wide by 24 pixels high (this allows us to easily support two sizes of toolbar, standard and large). Use the alpha channel to define areas in the images that must be transparent when displayed on a toolbar. There are many good icon editors available.

The file name of such an image (without the .ico extension) must not clash with the name of an internal image, otherwise the internal image will be used. The easiest way to prevent such a clash is to store the icons in a sub-folder of the folder containing the toolbar file. All such sub-folders must be relative to the folder in which the toolbar file is stored.

The second option is to change file name to (*.ico) then press enter.

In this example we are adding the Alignment Settings as a button on the My Tools toolbar, and we are using the built-in image for the command.

Save the changes to the toolbar

File Menu › Save

Viewing the new Toolbar

To view the new toolbar, AllyCAD will have to be closed and reopened.

Once AllyCAD has been re-opened click on the View Menu › Toolbars. The new toolbar will be listed in the Toolbars window and once it is selected the toolbar will be displayed.