Changing toolbar icons in Guide

It is somewhat easy to change the icons used in Guide. There are many good reasons to do so. You may simply find some of the icons non-intuitive; many are nothing but numbers, assigned almost at random, because no "real" icon has been drawn yet. I've made icons for some functions, and people with more artistic talent than me have made still more.

If you edit the text file toolbar.dat from your Guide folder, you will see the entire list of toolbar functions. (This is the list shown when you use Settings... Toolbar.) It contains lines such as

0301
# 32769  !load.bmp         Load Mark
# 32770  !save.bmp         Save Mark
# 32771  !delete.bmp       Delete Mark
# 57607 g!print.bmp        Print
#  2019  !go_obna.bmp      Go to by object name
     22  !go_Mess.bmp      Go to a Messier object
#  2476  !go_Mess.bmp      Alternative "go to Messier"
#    23  !go_NGC.bmp       Go to an NGC object
#    24  !go_IC.BMP        Go to IC
     31  !go_Hori.bmp      Go to a horizon point

The above would tell Guide that there are 301 valid toolbar buttons. Most have a '#' at the start of the line, telling Guide that they are not currently enabled on the toolbar; in the above case, the 'go to Messier' and 'go to horizon point' buttons would appear, but not the others.

The name of the icon is given starting in column 13. You'll notice that they are all .BMP (Windows bitmap) files. Almost all are 16-color files, because they are smaller, but high-color bitmaps can also be used if you wish. Guide has a default 'go_Mess.bmp', for example, but if you created a bitmap with that name and put it into the Guide folder, Guide would use it in preference to the default version. Changing toolbar icons is really that easy.

Well, almost so. There are a couple of things you should know about:

Many of the icons have only numbers for names (such as "15.bmp"). In such a case, you should use Notepad to change this to a more meaningful name (such as "grs_long.bmp"). The name does have to be eight or fewer characters, plus the '.bmp' extension.

Most icons come in two sizes, small and large. Which version is shown is decided by the "Use large buttons" check-box in the Toolbar dialog. The large versions should be stored in the folder toolbar2 below the Guide folder. For example, for the icon go_mess.bmp, the large version would be stored as toolbar2\go_mess.bmp. Alternatively, it can be stored as go_mes2.bmp, same folder as Guide: the last character in the name becomes a '2' (for "second choice").

If there is no large icon available, then Guide will just use the default small icon, even if the "Use large buttons" box is checked.

You'll see that the small icons are almost always 18 pixels high and 19 pixels wide. (This allows them to be placed to the right of the "usual" menu items, without needing to make the menu bar wider.) The large icons are all 32 pixels square. It's wise to keep the height the same, so the icons will all line up correctly. But there is no reason to insist on them all being 19 or 32 pixels wide. If you feel that making an icon a few pixels wider would improve its usefulness, please go ahead and do so.

Activating disabled toolbar buttons in Guide

If you edit the text file toolbar.dat in your Guide folder, you'll see that the first line reads (as of 14 Jan 2007) 310, indicating that a total of 310 toolbar buttons are possible. When you go into Settings... Toolbar, you should see that list of 310 buttons. However, you may also note that toolbar.dat has over 640 lines in it (not including a slew of comments at the end of the file). You might reasonably wonder why only 314 get used in Settings... Toolbar, and might want to activate some of the remaining 330-odd items.

Most of those remaining items work, but are shut off because they aren't (for most people) all that useful or interesting. (Do you really need, for example, the ability to zoom in 17 levels or to "go to" S/2001 J 11 with a single mouse click?) Others are shut off because they don't work yet: for example, there are toolbar buttons to switch to Finnish, Hebrew, Danish, etc., but I won't turn those on until someone translates Guide into those languages. Other actions are specific to DOS Guide.

But a few of the buttons really may be useful to you. For example, if you have a Meade LX-200 scope, your eye might catch the following twelve items partway down in toolbar.dat:

#  2731  !22.bmp           Focus in fast
#  2732  !23.bmp           Focus in slow
#  2733  !focussto.bmp     Stop focuser
#  2734  !25.bmp           Focus out fast
#  2735  !26.bmp           Focus out slow
#  2736  !27.bmp           Focus speed 1
#  2737  !28.bmp           Focus speed 2
#  2738  !29.bmp           Focus speed 3
#  2739  !30.bmp           Focus speed 4
#  2740  !31.bmp           Turn on GPS
#  2741  !32.bmp           Turn off GPS
#  2742  !33.bmp           Initialize from GPS

(Note that the last seven items are supported only on Autostar and GPS scopes... and Meade's documentation is poor; you may find that other scopes support the focuser commands, or that the commands aren't supported on your Autostar or GPS scope.) You could cut-and-paste these twelve lines up among the top 310 lines. There are already LX-200 focuser related commands in that part; you would probably do best to put them in that existing group.

You would then want to increase the number given at the top of the file by twelve, to 322, and save it. When you next fire up Guide, the new items will be shown in Settings... Toolbar, and you can turn them on/off or assign hotkeys to them, just as with any other item in that dialog.

Note also that some options don't have an associated bitmap. In such cases, you must add a bitmap to get the option to show up on the toolbar. (Just pick one at random. In the above set of Meade commands, for example, I just used "number" bitmaps. Of course, if you're really adventurous, you can create your own bitmaps for the toolbar, as described at the top of this page.)