Customizing Wildfire sketcher icons

I started digging into customizing sketcher icons soon after Wildfire came out. You might have noticed that there are some new icons ~ circle from three points, curve from three tangents, line from two tangents. And, you probably noticed them because PTC plastered them on top of the pile, as the defaults in their respective split buttons. So, instead of the most used center-radius circle icon on top, there was the 3-point circle icon, etc. I suppose they could have just mentioned the new icons in the release notes and waited for everyone to find and try them. But, there's nothing in the release notes, or anywhere else, for that matter, so maybe they just decided to rub our noses in them. Well, I got the point, about the first week, and then I just wanted to bury the new icons at the bottom of the pile.

Seemed simple enough to fix: just go to 'Tools>Customize Screen>Commands' and from the tree, select Sketcher Tools........ and all the icons are greyed out. Okay, yeah, of course, who would want to be able to set up and manipulate tool bars unless you were actually in the application they apply to. Doesn't matter who'd want to, you can't. You have to be in Sheet Metal to customize sheetmetal toolbars, you have to be in Mechanism Design to do it's icons, etc.

Okay, so I start a feature or redefine one so that I can get to sketcher so that I can go to 'Tools>Customize Screen' and........ Customize Screen is greyed out. HA HA Very funny. Real cute. A little Catch-22 from Pro/GOOFY!

That's where I was some months ago. This weekend, I was definitely going to post to this group to see if anyone had any better experirnece. But, as I was doing this, I thought of something I wanted to to check out: what about other sketch-type functions, specifically, detailing's sketcher? was it similarly restricted from accessing Customize Screen? Not only can you customize the icons, but the set of icons almost duplicates those used for feature sketches, including some of the flyout groups. Plus you can do parametric sketching.

I also tried customizing the buttons while in a Sketched Curve, though it seemed to me that while Customize Screen was available and the icons were available in Sketcher Tools, some of them still were greyed out, meaning that not all sketcher functionality was available. But with these successes, I made an observation that was the key to figuring it all out: both of these functions were still on the old Menu Manager interface. So, I tried on more old style solid feature creation tool, the Blend with parallel, regular sketched sections. Sure enough, when in sketcher, Customize Screen was available and I successfully moved the offending icons to the bottom of the pile, saved the changes to config.win and got back the new defaults with the next new part I started.

So, you can customize sketcher icons, but not when you are creating a feature that uses the new Dashboard interface. Don't know why, maybe they've fixed it by now and I'm just behind the times. But, in case you are too, here's the perennial Pro/e 'workaround'.

David Janes

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David Janes
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