Using the Tear-Off Region

You can place frequently used menu selections and commands in the tear-off region below the menu bar; in the tear-off region, they become buttons that you can click on to execute functions. Figure 10-1 shows the buttons that are there by default.

Figure 10-1 The Tear-Off Region

Putting menu selections and commands in the tear-off region lets you access them without having to pull down a menu or issue a command from the command line.

Changes you make to the tear-off region are saved when you leave Prism; see " Where Prism Stores Your Changes".

Adding Menu Selections to the Tear-Off Region

You can add menu selections to the tear-off region from either the menu bar or the command line.

• From the menu bar - To add a menu selection to the tear-off region, first enter tear-off mode by choosing Tear-off from the Utilities menu. A dialog box appears that describes tear-off mode; see Figure 10-2.

Figure 10-2 Tear-Off Region Dialog Box

While the dialog box is on the screen, choosing any selection from a menu adds a button for this selection to the tear-off region. Clicking on a button in the tear-off region removes that button. If you fill up the region, you can resize it to accommodate more buttons. To resize the region, drag the small resize box at the bottom right of the region.

Click on Close or press the Esc key while the mouse pointer is in the dialog box to close the box and leave tear-off mode.

When you are not in tear-off mode, clicking on a button in the tear-off region has the same effect as choosing the equivalent selection from a menu.

• From the command window - Use the tearoff and untearoff commands from the command window to add menu selections to and remove them from the tear-off region. Put the selection name in quotation marks; case doesn't matter, and you can omit spaces and the ellipsis (...) that indicates the selection displays a window or dialog box. If the selection name is ambiguous, put the menu name in parentheses after the selection name. For example,

tearoff "print (events)"

adds a button for the Print selection from the Events menu to the tear-off region.

Adding Prism Commands to the Tear-Off Region

To add a Prism command to the tear-off region, issue the pushbutton command, specifying the label for the tear-off button and the command it is to execute. The label must be a single word. The command can be any valid Prism command, along with its arguments. For example,

pushbutton printa print a on dedicated

adds a button labeled printa to the tear-off region. Clicking on it executes the command print a on dedicated.

To remove a button created via the pushbutton command, you can either click on it while in tear-off mode, or issue the untearoff command as described above.