T.A. Toolbar allows you to create your own, brand new buttons as well as to
customize all of the default buttons. Since the customization routine uses Word
to store the text of your customized buttons, any feature that is native to Word
can be used when creating your new buttons.
Creating New Buttons
To create a new button, open the custom buttons form by clicking this button on
T.A. Toolbar:
The following form will open up:
Click the Add button and type a short name for your new button. By default, the
name of your button will appear as the tooltip that opens when you mouse over
your new button, but you can change this if you want to. You may also select
any image of your creation for the new button. Just browse to your desired
directory and pick a picture.
Now to edit the text that your new button will insert. Click on the Change button
text with Winword button. A Word document will open up. Here you can create
the text that you want inserted when clicking this button. Again, any feature that
is native to Word can be used. For example, you may want to embed a
hyperlink in your comment so that students can use their web browsers to
access more information. You can use colors and other graphics as well.
When you are done creating your text, save the document and close it. Then
click OK at the bottom of the customization form. Your new button will appear in
the Custom buttons section of T.A. Toolbar.
It is important to realize that your new buttons will not automatically be included
in the Index of Errors. To mark your new custom button text to be included in the
Index of Errors, select the text that you want to appear in the Index of Errors, like
so:
Now hit Alt-Shift-x to bring up the Mark Entry dialog box which looks like this:
Now just click the Mark button, and you're done. When you have used your new
button, and subsequently use the Index of Errors button, the editor's shorthand
"Awk" (in the example above) will show up in the generated index.
Creating Subsequent Buttons
You may find it handy to create pairs of custom buttons that behave the way the
standard buttons do. (See Why Button Pairs for more information.) If so, then
after creating a new button, create another button, perhaps with a similar image,
whose inserted text is a just an abbreviation for the designated error. For
example, after having created the Awkward button above, an Awkward-
Subsequent button can be created that is hyperlinked back to the initial instance
of the Awkward button comment.
For this to work, two things must be done. First, the initial Awkward button must
include a hyperlink bookmark; and second, the subsequent button must be
linked to it.
To insert a bookmark into the initial Awkward button, we return to the
Customization Manager, and open the Awkward button's text document, which
looks something like this:
Click to place the cursor just inside the first character of the comment--in this
case, inside the first square bracket. Then, in Word's standard toolbar, choose
Insert and then choose Bookmark, like so:
This opens the following dialog box, where we will type the abbreviation "Awk."
Now click the Add button and the Bookmark dialog disappears. The Awk
bookmark is now embedded in the initial Awkward button text.
Next we create an Awkward-subsequent button in the usual way:
Now, we click the "Change button text with Winword" button and select the
edited button text--in this case, just an abbreviation:
Now select insert hyperlink from the standard toolbar in Word:
This will open the hyperlink dialog window:
Normally, Word users can simply click the Bookmark button to connect
hyperlinks to bookmarks, but in this case the Awkward button text and the
Awkward-subsequent button text are stored in two separate documents, so it is
necessary to type the bookmark by hand into the Address window at the bottom
of the form. Here's what we type: #yourbookmarkname
In our example, then, we will have the following:
Now click OK.
Next, we will probably want to make sure that instances of the Awkward-
subsequent button are included in the Error Index, if used, and to do this we
follow exactly the same procedure as outlined above for the first Awkward
button. Once we have completed this step, we may close the Awkward--
subsequent text document, then click OK to close the Customization Manager.
You now have a pair of linked buttons that treat issues of awkward or non-
idiomatic phrasing.
Editing the Existing Buttons
To customize the existing default buttons, simply select the appropriate button by
opening the drop down menu at the top of the customization form, like so:
Select the appropriate section of T.A. Toolbar and then all the buttons in the
section will appear in the list on the left.
The process from here is exactly the same as outlined above for creating custom
buttons. Just select a button in the list to edit, then feel free to change the
tooltip, image, or associated text. Remember to click OK after editing the text.
It is important to realize that, even though you may change any button, you will
not be able to re-duplicate every functionality in every way. Specifically, editing
those buttons that by default highlight problematic words will lose the highlighting
functionality. and this cannot be regained once changed. You have been
warned!
