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Important Announcement: All AcadXTabs new licenses and license seat upgrades ordered on or after 01/01/08 automatically receive a free upgrade to the new and vastly improved AcadXTabs 2010 |
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Introducing AcadXTabs |
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AcadXTabs is a lightweight, 100% ObjectARX based add-in for AutoCAD 2000 or later. AcadXTabs adds a tabbed MDI document control interface to AutoCAD. With multiple documents open in the AutoCAD editor, AcadXTabs will display a horizontal row of tabs, one for each open document. You can use these tabs to quickly change the active document with a single mouse click. You can also use the right-click context menu of each tab to quickly navigate to any layout in any open document.
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| These illustrations show AutoCAD running with AcadXTabs. The tabs can be placed above or below the drawing view area of the AutoCAD window. Unlike other similar solutions, AcadXTabs is a small ARX file, requiring No Visual Basic baggage; VB Runtime; ActiveX controls or "Dockable Container"! Unlike other similar solutions, AcadXTabs is not a toolbar. It always aligns over the document view, even when other docked tools are visible. AcadXTabs also supports AutoCAD 2004's CleanScreen full-screen mode. AcadXTabs integrates directly into the AutoCAD user interface, seamlessly and transparently. | |||
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AcadXTabs automatically hides itself when less than two documents are open in AutoCAD. You can switch between open documents by clicking on a document's tab. You can right click on a tab to access a document's window menu. |
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Fully Customizable Popup Menu Support AcadXTabs can display a popup context menu when you right click on a tab. Like AutoCAD's standard popup context menus, AcadXTabs document tab popup menus can be customized, just like any custom AutoCAD menu. The sample custom popup menus in the included AcadXTabs.mns file demonstrates this. AcadXTabs supports up to four different context menus. Access to additional menus is facilitated by right-clicking on a tab while holding down the SHIFT and/or CTRL keys. To use custom document tab popup menus, use the AutoCAD MENULOAD command (or choose Customize, Menus from the AutoCAD Tools menu) to install the AcadXTabs.mns partial menu. See the comments in the AcadXTabs.mns file for special naming rules for the menu group name and menu tag name. Be sure to place this partial menu file in your AutoCAD library search path. If no custom popup menu is loaded, AcadXTabs will use a built-in default menu with the most commonly used items from the standard AutoCAD File menu, along with Layouts. Layout, View and Layer States Context Menu Support AcadXTabs automatically appends the names of all layouts in each document to the end of the context menu for the document's tab (including custom user-defined menus). This gives you a more direct means of activating any layout in drawings containing a large number of same, where the tabs of some layouts must often be scrolled into view. This scheme reduces the task of switching to any layout in any open document, to a single context menu selection (right-clicking on a tab activates the associated document and displays its context menu, and selecting a layout from the menu actives the layout). The following screenshot shows the document tab context menu for the Welding Fixture-1 sample drawing included with AutoCAD 2004. Notice that while only 3 1/2 layout tabs are visible at the bottom of the window, the names of all layouts are clearly displayed in the document tab's context menu, making it far easier to navigate to any layout in the document without the need to scroll layout tabs. This feature may seem insignificant, but in reality it significantly reduces user fatigue that results from the constant need to scroll layout tabs into view, in order to activate them.
In addition to Layouts, AcadXTabs also adds submenus containing each document's named views and layer states to the document tab's context menu, as shown in the screenshot below. Selecting a named view or layer state from their respective submenu restores that view or layer state. If the CTRL key is held down while selecting a view from the view submenu, the selected view is redefined to the current view.
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