The GUI allows several levels of customization, ranging from a simple change in the sizes of the GUI and the areas in it to a more complex change in the menu hierarchy and design of the dialog boxes. GUI attributes you can change include these items:
The size of the GUI and the areas in it
Colors and fonts
The menus shown at GUI start-up
The mouse and keyboard focus
The menu hierarchy and dialog boxes.
You can resize the toolbar, Main Menu, and Graphics Window, as well as the overall size of the GUI. To resize the areas in the GUI, drag one of the borders around the areas of the GUI while holding down the left mouse button.
To change the overall size of the GUI, position the mouse on of the corners of the GUI and drag it diagonally toward the center of the GUI while holding down the left mouse button. You can save your GUI size settings by selecting .
Note: The "save layout" feature does not save all windows. However, it saves most of the commonly used windows, such as the picking menu, the Pan, Zoom, Rotate dialog box, and other dialog boxes associated with working plane, Toolbar, selecting, etc. on the Utility Menu.
The system-level fonts determine the default GUI font component for both Windows and Linux systems. On Windows systems, Mechanical APDL uses the fonts that you set at the Display Properties system level. For Windows systems, the fonts in the GUI are based on your system font settings, as follows:
| GUI Items | Windows Item Font Equivalent |
| Utility Menu | Menu |
| Main Menu | Icon |
| Tool Tip | Tool Tip |
| Dialog | Message Box |
On Linux systems, the Common Desktop Environment (CDE) is a standardized windowing environment that provides GUI configurations similar to Windows. For CDE systems, the fonts you designate at the system level are used as the default. For non - CDE systems, the program provides a set of fonts for the default settings.
When you modify your system-level fonts, the Mechanical APDL default fonts change accordingly.
For both Windows and Linux, use the dialog to modify the GUI fonts. After you change these settings, use the to save the settings. The settings you save will override the system fonts and become the default.
You can also modify the Main Menu fonts by using the "right mouse button" - preferences function. At this level, you set specific fonts and colors in the Main Menu at a functional level. That is, you can change the overall fonts, and change the colors according to the progressive level as you open the nested menu items. This process is discussed in The Main Menu section of the GUI discussion earlier in this manual.
Note: On Windows systems, set your Display settings to Small Fonts for all screen resolutions. If you use Large Fonts, your screen may not display the entire contents of large dialog boxes in Mechanical APDL.
Within Mechanical APDL , you can change the font attributes of the
numbers and characters appearing on your displays by issuing the
/DEVICE,FONT,KEY command. This command requires
val1 through val6 as
arguments. These arguments allow you to indicate the family name of the font that
you wish to use (for example, Courier), the weight of the font (for example,
medium), font size, and other attributes that define font selection.
By default, the main areas of the GUI (Utility Menu, Main Menu, Standard Toolbar, Toolbar, Input Window, Graphics Window, and Output Window) display when you activate the GUI. The /MSTART command allows you to choose which GUI components are shown when the GUI is activated in addition to the main areas. (The /MSTART command has no equivalent GUI path.)
By including a set of /MSTART commands in your start.ans file, you can ensure that the program displays the same GUI components at the start of every session. For example, to activate the Pan, Zoom, Rotate dialog box at GUI start-up, the commands would be:
/MSTART,ZOOM,ON
The /MSTART command affects only how the GUI is initialized. You can always open additional GUI components once you are in the GUI.
The program uses the concept of input focus to determine which window on the screen is active; that is, which window receives input from the mouse and the keyboard. A window may have implicit focus (also known as pointer focus), in which case moving the mouse pointer into that window makes it active. With explicit focus, you need to move the pointer into the window and click the left button for that window to be active.
The GUI also gives automatic keyboard focus to the Input Window. This means you can enter a command without first moving the mouse into the Input Window. If you bring up a dialog box, then keyboard focus is automatically redirected to it so you can enter data without moving the mouse. This feature is sometimes called the hot keyboard feature.
You can change the menu hierarchy to suit your analysis needs, alter the design of many of the dialog boxes and add your own macros (in the form of dialog boxes) to the menu hierarchy.
The Mechanical APDL program reads a file called menulist.ans. This file lists the names of files containing the menu screens. The menulist.ans file must be available for the program to work.
Usually, the menulist.ans file resides in the /ansys_inc/v242/ansys/gui/en-us/UIDL directory (Linux systems) or the Program Files\ANSYS Inc\V242\ANSYS\gui\en-us\UIDL subdirectory (Windows systems). However, both your current working and home directories are also searched to allow for user customization of the menu system.
To modify the dialog boxes and main menus, use the ANSYS, Inc.-developed GUI programming language, called the User Interface Design Language (UIDL).
Note: Information about the User Interface Design Language (UIDL) is found in the Ansys UIDL Programmer's Guide . This is an archived document that is no longer maintained. It does not undergo any verification and is not part of the Mechanical APDL product documentation set. Therefore, the Ansys UIDL Programmer's Guide is not considered to be part of the formal program specification as stated in your license agreement.
Ansys, Inc. considers customization via UIDL a nonstandard use of the program, one that the Ansys, Inc. Quality Assurance verification testing program does not cover. Therefore, you are responsible for verifying that the results produced are accurate and that your customizations do not adversely affect unchanged areas of the Mechanical APDL program.
As an alternative to using UIDL to create dialog boxes, you can create new GUI components and dialog boxes by using the Tool Command Language and Toolkit, often referred to as Tcl/Tk. This capability is only available for shared-memory parallel processing (SMP) solutions.