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Chapter 4The Menu File
Overview of Menu Files
The menu file is an ASCII TXT file consisting of sections that define the func-tion of each part of the user interface except the command line, for example,pull-down menus, toolbars, and the buttons on a pointing device.The default menu file is
acad.mnu.
You can find it in the
support
folder andopen it in Notepad to see what a complete menu file looks like. To open themenu file, on the Tools menu, click Customize
➤
Edit Custom Files
➤
Current Menu.You can create or modify menu files to
■
Add or change menus (including shortcut menus, image tile menus, andtablet menus) and toolbars
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Assign commands to buttons on your pointing device
■
Create and modify shortcut keys
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Add tooltips
■
Provide Help text on the status lineTo add a new menu, for example, you can modify the appropriate section of
acad.mnu
and save it under a new name, or you can create a new menu file.In the following example, a drawing project requires frequent use of circleswith a radius of 1, 2, or 3 units. To work more efficiently, you can create amenu file that defines a pull-down menu with three options, each of whichdraws a circle with a different radius. To create the menu file, you type thelines into Notepad (or any other text editor that saves in ASCII format) andthen save the file in the AutoCAD
support
folder with an .
mnu
extension. Themenu file in this example could be named
circles
.
mnu
.
***MENUGROUP=CIRCLES***POP13//Creates circles with radii 1, 2, 3Circle-1 [Radius-1 ]^C^C_circle \1Circle-2 [Radius-2 ]^C^C_circle \2Circle-3 [Radius-3 ]^C^C_circle \3
The first line in a menu file is always the Menugroup section, which providesa unique name for the menu. In the example, the Menugroup name isCircles. The Menugroup name does not need to be the same as the file name.The second line in the example is a section label. This menu is a pull-downmenu and therefore uses a Pop section with a number from 1 through 16(
POP13
). For more information about pull-down and shortcut menus, see“Create Pull-Down and Shortcut Menus” on page 70.
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