An application can completely control the appearance of a menu item by using an owner-drawn item. Owner-drawn items require an application to take total responsibility for drawing selected (highlighted), checked, and unchecked states. For example, if an application provided a font menu, it could draw each menu item by using the corresponding font; the item for Roman would be drawn with roman, the item for Italic would be drawn in italic, and so on.
For more information, see Creating Owner-Drawn Menu Items.