Expert: Scott Cook - 8/11/2010

Question
i cannot get acad to save the customized menu bars i use.
when i re-open acadr14 i get lots of smiley faces.
i have tried everything i can think of and am faced with acad induced suicide
i would be grateful for any help
james furrate,architect
Denton, Texas

Answer
You need to save the bitmaps you make for the toolbars to a file outside autocad. Use paint or something to make them, I think the dimensions are supposed to be 16x15 pixels and saved as a BMP file. Make all the bitmaps and put them in a folder together.
Then add that folder to the autocad search path (preferences command in 14).
Then when you make the menu, you need to reference the filename of the BMP for the image, without a path. Use a text editor for this. Note this applies for pre-CUI command versions of autocad. In current versions the menu format is not directly editable, which sucks if you ask me.

When you load the menu, the bitmaps will be correct. If they are not, you need to exit autocad and delete your .MNC and .MNR files (but not MNS or MNU files) and it will recompile them when it opens. As long as the folder with the bitmaps is on the search path, and you have correctly referenced the bitmap filenames inside your menu source, autocad will rebuild those two files when it loads the menu again.