Contents

• The leader toolbar
• Changing the leader style shown at the top of the toolbar

The leader toolbar

The standard leader toolbar uses primarily the leaders with the "standard" arrowhead and looks like the following:

The idea behind the way the layers are arranged in this toolbar is that the arrowhead style you use as your "standard" has all of the leader commands displayed at the top and just the standard leader commands and the symbol leader commands appear in the other arrowhead styles below for "special uses".

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Changing the leader style shown at the top of the toolbar

The default leader style that is shown at the top of the toolbar is "standard". All of the leader commands that use the "standard" arrowhead are shown there. To switch the style of arrowhead that is used at the top of the toolbar we must edit the menu file that contains the definition for the toolbar.

Open the "aps-bas.mnu" file (or the "aps-bas04.mnu" file if using AutoCAD 2004 or later) in a text editor (Notepad works well for this) the file can be found in the "Custom" folder and search for "**LEADERS" (in Notepad <ctrl>F brings up the "Find" dialog, type in **LEADERS in the box and press "Find" or "Find Next"). This will take you to the code for the leaders toolbar. It will look similar to this:

For this example we will assume that you would like to use the "simple" arrowhead style. The "simple" arrowhead style is designated in the toolbar code as those with an "S" at the end of the ID tag like ID_LEADRS. The other styles also use a letter at the end of their ID tag to help show their style.

LEADR - Std Arrowhead LEADRA - Architectural Arrowhead LEADRB - Butterfly Arrowhead LEADRD - Dot Arrowhead LEADRS - Simple Arrowhead LEADRT - Tick Arrowhead

The types of arrowheads are shown above. The "standard" style has no style letter but all the others do so using the LEADR command as an example they are as shown.

The first thing that we will do is move the "simple" leader commands to the top.

Highlight the "simple" leader commands and the "divider bar" at the bottom as shown above.

From the "Edit" pull-down select "Cut".

Place the cursor to the left of the topmost LEADR command

Note: The line that starts with the ID_LEADERS tag is the header line for the toolbar itself and is not actually a button. Make sure that it stays at the top or the toolbar won't show up correctly on the screen.)

Select "Paste" from the "Edit" pull-down to insert the "simple" style leaders where the cursor is located.

When done it should look similar to this. Now that the "simple" style leaders are at the top of the toolbar we would like to show more of the "simple" leader commands and less of the "standard" leaders. You will notice that several of the lines of the code start with //. A double forward slash "comments out" the line (makes it so that AutoCAD ignores the line).

Since we want all of the "simple" leader commands to show in the toolbar we should delete the //'s that are in front of the "simple" style commands as shown above.

Now let's get rid of some of the "standard" style leader commands. We have been showing just the LEADR and SLEADR commands in the other arrowhead styles so that is what we will show of the "standard" style as well. Place double forward slashes (//) in front of the lines that we would like to hide as shown above.

Select "Save" from the "File" pull-down and you're done.

By moving and changing whether a leader command is hidden or not you can adjust your leader toolbar to show all the leader commands that you might use (and hide the ones you won't). Of course you may mix styles. Some people like to use the "tick" style arrowhead when using the ELVNEW and ELVEXST leader commands. You could move the "tick" versions up to the top and hide the "simple" versions we show in the example above.

To get the changes to the toolbar to show up we must reload the menu file.

To see the changes you just made to the "aps-bas.mnu" or "aps-bas04.mnu" file type in MENULOAD at the command prompt. The following dialog will appear:

Select the "APS_BAS" menu group from the "Menu Groups:" box and press the "Unload" button.

Next press the "Browse..." button and find the "aps-bas.mnu" file (or "aps-bas04.mnu" if using AutoCAD 2004 or later). It should be located in the "...\APS\Custom" folder. Once it is found press the "Load" button to load the new version of the menu file. When it is done loading press "Close" to close this dialog.

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