Toolbar Editor

Applies to HTML Viewer, IE Browser publications.

The "toolbar" component displays an enhanced bar with large buttons that allow end users to quickly access to the most used commands. By default publications contain several predefined buttons: Home, Reload, Back, Next, Print, Search, Contents, Favorites and Custom.

The roles of these buttons are explained below:

  1. Home: return to the contents page.
  2. Reload: refresh the current page.
  3. Back: return to the previous loaded page.
  4. Forward: go to the next page (in the case end users have already pressed Back).
  5. Print: displays the page printer dialog.
  6. Search: displays the publication search panel.
  7. Custom: opens the HTML page specified in the "CustomButtonURL" property of the Menu Bar. Be sure to specify the page URL if you plan to use this button. Example: creating a button that opens the Web browser to your website.
  8. Contents: displays or hides the table of contents (TOC) panel.
  9. Favorites: displays or hides the Favorites panel.

The toolbar editor allows you to add new buttons to the toolbar bar, associate commands with them and configure their properties. You can also reorder these buttons.

To open the toolbar editor, go to the User Interface tab, select "Tool Bar" and click the "Edit" button.

See a fast screencast about how to add an "exit" button that calls a macro command

 

Description of the editor

On the left side you see the tree that lists all of the buttons. All of the predefined buttons are already in the list: you can select them in order to modify their properties but you are not allowed to remove them (if you want to remove a predefined button, you can set its Visible property to False).

To add a button, click Add. You will be prompted to enter the caption of the button.

To edit a button, select it in the tree and you can then modify its properties (which are shown on the right side).

To change all glyphs of the standard buttons, select Set All Button Glyphs. See below.

Each button has the following properties:

List of global properties:

  • Caption: the text to be displayed on the button. Leave the field blank to disable showing captions. You may also directly read the caption from the resource strings with the variables (variable names must begin and end with the character "%"); for example, %SHome% will be replaced by the "Home" entry from the resource strings table.
  • Hint: the text to be displayed in the hint window (help tips).
  • Layout: determines where the image appears on the bitmap button.
  • Margin: Offset in pixels for glyph and text.
  • NumGlyphs: Count of images in Picture. In fact Picture can include 4 images (1-normal image, 2-not enabled image, 3-active image, 4-down image).
  • Picture: set the button's glyph. Click on the '...' button to open the Bitmap editor, allowing you to select a bitmap or clear it.
  • SkinDataName: internal use only at this time. Do not change the value.
  • Spacing: offset in pixels between glyph and text.
  • Transparent: if True then the button will have an alpha-blend effect.
  • TransparentValue: value of alphablending (0..255) for the button.
  • Visible: if set to false, the button is removed.

User-defined buttons have extra properties:

  • Name: this is a unique internal identifier used by HTML Executable and script commands. Only alphanumeric characters are allowed without spaces.
  • Action: defines the action executed when the end user clicks on the button. See below.

Be sure to click on Apply after you have modified the properties of a button, otherwise they won't be saved!

To remove a button, select it in the tree and click on Remove.

You can reorder the buttons using drag/drop operations. Note that the order of the predefined buttons cannot be modified (but you can insert new buttons between them).

Actions of the user-defined buttons

Each button can execute an action when it is clicked. You can select between three actions:

  • Do nothing: no action is executed. Not recommended.
     
  • Show this page/URL: the button will open the specified HTML page or a URL. You can select a page of your publication by clicking on the small button near the field.
    HEScript commands are also accepted (hescript://[scriptname].[functionprocedurename]), see this topic for more information. For example, if you enter hescript://Macros.MacroShowAbout, then the button will show the about box when it is clicked.
     
  • Execute this script function: a HEScript script procedure or Boolean function is executed. Syntax: [scriptname].[functionname]. Parameters are not allowed, and only procedure or Boolean functions are accepted. If you want to pass parameters, then you should use a hescript:// call as explained above.

You can for instance call pre-defined macros.

Loading a set of toolbar glyphs (pictures)

Instead of manually modifying each button's glyph, HTML Executable lets you load all glyphs in one click from an existing glyph set.

In the Toolbar Editor, just click on Set All Button Glyphs. A bitmap editor appears and shows you the current set of all button glyphs:

You can either Save it as an external bitmap file if you wish to make modifications, or Load a new glyph set from an existing bitmap file (Paste from Clipboard is also accepted).

  • All glyphs must have the same width & height. The standard size in pixels is 22x22 but you are free to use your preferred size.
  • The background color (fuchsia on the screenshot above) will be set as the transparent one.
  • Only bitmap (BMP) files are allowed.
  • The width of the glyph set's bitmap must be a multiple of the height (width = height x 11).
  • All glyph sets must contain 11 items (there are 9 standard buttons, and 2 buttons have 2 states - see NumGlyphs property above).

Some existing sets are available in the Toolbar subfolder of HTML Executable; you can use them in your publications.