Adding icons to your tools

Original Article Date: March 16, 2006

Now here's a short little article that explains how you can add icons to your new tools in MicroStation v8 XM Edition. Note that this article is based upon version 08.09.02.12

MicroStation V8 XM Edition is now a Windows compliant application which allows you to user icon file ( *.ico ) for your icons. An alternate method is to create a bitmap image outside of MicroStation with any kind of image editing software such as Microsoft’s Paint program. Either way you will need to generate the icons outside of MicroStation.

If you plan on creating just a couple of icons, you can probably just Paint or something similar. On the other hand, if you plan on creating several hundred icons, you might want to consider purchasing a proper icon editor to do this.

OK – so what’s involved in creating an icon and getting it onto a tool? Let’s take a look.

The remainder of this article assumes that you’ve imported an old pre-XM Settings Manager file or have created tools that are in need of icons. From the Customize dialog, navigate to the Tools tab and drill into the User Tools until you locate the tool that needs an icon. Direct your sight to the General Settings portion of the dialog and notice that the icon appears as a wrench. This indicates that the tool does not have an icon associated with it.

Open the user tool you wish to select an icon for as listed below on the user tool foe “linear dimensions”. If you look at the lower section where the properties are, under the general settings you will see the current icon being used for this tool. There should be a browse button next to the actual icon.

Select the browse button which is indicated with the three little dots and the Define Icon for Tool dialog will open. This dialog will let you look for and import icons from these possible locations:

- Applications
- Current Design File
- Import Selected Icons
- Import Selected Bitmaps