Building Your Own Interface

For repeated use of a particular tool, there is nothing better than having it right next to your cursor. But the downside to this is the temptation to keep all of your tools close by. Give in to that, and before you know it, your screen may look like Figure 34.5—and that’s without any dockers!

FIGURE 34.5  Watch out—it’s easy to go toolbar happy.

Clearly, another strategy is needed to keep a select set of tools within easy reach, and DRAW provides for it. To best illustrate it, consider yourself hired as our new designer.

Special Tools for a Special Project

We have commissioned you to create a floor plan for our new editorial division, in which each member of the writing team will have an office. We want the plan drawn to correct scale, and it must have sufficient detail. We are paying you $365,000 for your efforts, so you’d better do a good job.

As a savvy DRAW user, the first thing you think about are the electronic tools you will need for this project. You write down your tasks and the tools you will need for them:

•  You’ll need to import lots of objects from your personal home-furnishings library of clipart.

•  The Clipboard will be kept very busy with frequent copying and pasting.

•  You’ll be creating lots of rectangles and free-form objects.

•  The Copy Properties From command will be your faithful assistant, helping you quickly take attributes from other finished pieces.

•  You can already think of three layers that you’ll need for the various objects.

•  You’ll have to set a grid, and will be regularly turning on and off Snap to Grid and Snap to Objects.

•  You expect to be doing a lot of trimming and welding.

•  The View Manager, which can quickly zoom you into specific parts of the schematic, will offer a welcome advantage.

•  Your preliminary design reveals that certain shapes will need to be distinguished by fill patterns—black, 50% gray, and 20% gray.

With this list in hand, you float a few of the important toolbars and flyouts on your page and quickly conclude that you have no room left to work. To correct this, you move all of these toolbars outside of the DRAW window and hover them over the desktop. But now they are so far away from your cursor that reaching them via the menus would be easier.

Ah, but you have already read this chapter that you are now reading, and so you know what we haven’t yet told you: that you can create a work environment ideally suited for this project. Your first order of business is to head to Tools Ø Options Ø Workspace, and create a workspace called, say, Floorplan. Once you make it the current workspace, you are ready to explore the buried treasure that is the Customize dialog page of Options:

1.  From Customize, click on the Toolbars tab. There you will find every tool, command, and docker that exists on the menus, in the Standard toolbar, and in the toolbox—and even a few tools that exist nowhere!

2.  In the middle window, click on the plus sign beside File & Layout, then on File, and then on one of the listed commands. In the Buttons area, 28 icons appear, each one representing a command appropriate to the File menu.

3.  Select a command in the list and note that its icon in the Buttons area is highlighted, and the Description area explains the command. You can also hover your cursor over the icon to get the description as bubble help.

4.  Find the button for Import and drag it from the dialog onto the page. As you do, DRAW automatically creates a toolbar to house it.

This fledgling toolbar contains only the Import button so far. Assuming this is your first custom toolbar, DRAW has called it Toolbar 1 (although it’s so small, the name won’t fit on its title bar).

5.  Referring to your list of tools and commands, you start moving through the command tree in the Toolbars page. Still under File & Layout, you expand Grid, Guidelines & Snap, click on Grid and Ruler Setup, and drag the highlighted button to your new toolbar. Then you do the same with Snap to Objects. You don’t need to take Snap to Grid, because you’ve been pressing Ctrl+Y for that since version 2.

6.  Moving on to Styles, Layers & Object Management, you take the Object Manager button and add it to your toolbar. Your toolbar is starting to grow.

7.  Next you go to the Edit & Transform category. From the Editing Commands group, you decline the Clipboard commands because you can press Ctrl+C and Ctrl+V in your sleep. (Your sole criterion in selecting icons is ease of access, and you’re a right-handed mouse user, so Ctrl+C is easier than clicking on an icon.) However, you do drag the Copy Properties From button to your new toolbar.

8.  Under the View & Display category, you explore the Zoom & Pan group and take View Manager, which is a tremendous help when zooming in and out of many different parts of a drawing.

9.  Next, from Toolbars Ø Toolbox, you take the Bézier tool.

10.  Under Fill & Outline Ø Fill, you scroll the long list and find icons for Black Fill, Gray20 Fill, Gray50 Fill—just what you need. (These icons used to be on the Fill flyout, but they disappeared in DRAW 9.)

11.  For better organization, you place the Bézier tool at the beginning of the toolbar, just by dragging it there. You move a few other icons around, based on whatever divine guidance you possess.

12.  You discover, probably by accident, that if you move an icon a tiny bit one direction or the other, DRAW creates a separator. So you waste no time determining logical groupings for functions.

13.  A few of the icons have unintelligible symbols, so for each one, you right-click, choose Properties, click Show Text, and type in a short identifier.

	TIP When the Customize dialog is open, you do not need to hold Alt to move icons. With Customize open, it’s as if the entire interface is unlocked, so you could also drag icons from visible toolbars and place them on your custom one.

14.  You resize the toolbar so that it appears as two rows instead of one long one.

15.  Finally, you back out to the main Customize page of Options, find Toolbar 1, click on it twice to get a cursor, and rename it to Floorplan Tools. Your custom toolbar is now ready for active duty.