Defining Menus

Help can display multiple drop-down menus containing several menu items. Space considerations might preclude using more than eight or nine menus, and on a 640 by 480 VGA screen, a drop-down menu can display about 20 menu items. However, if you only consider the physical limitations, you may introduce serious usability problems. For that reason, when designing custom menus take into account both the physical and usability factors.

Help provides a series of macros for configuring the menu bar. Using these macros, you can do the following:

nAdd menus to the menu bar

nAdd menu items to menus, at the end of the menu or in a specific position

nRemove menu items

nChange menu item macros

nDisable or enable a menu item

nAdd and remove check marks from menu items

nAssign accelerator keys to menu functions

The following sections describe how to use Help macros to perform each of these tasks. For comprehensive information about using Help macros, see Chapter 14, “Help Macros.” For information about how to assign accelerator keys to menu and button functions, see “Defining Accelerator Keys,” later in this chapter.

Note:

Some menu macros don’t work when run from a topic displayed in a secondary window. In those cases, you must run the macros from the Help project file or from a topic displayed in the main window.