Transparent Toolbar Button Images

I have been working recently on some white papers covering menu customization and one of the things that just recently came up (about five minutes ago from one of my good friends Steven). The question that he asked was how to create a transparent background in the Button Editor for creating images in AutoCAD 2004 and higher. To do this you can use the Light Grey color in the lower-left corner of the swatch for AutoCAD 2002 and earlier, or the True Color 192,192,192 in AutoCAD 2004 and later. Thanks for the memory jog Steven and an excellent question.

Sincerely,
  Lee

Comments

[Ignacio Arrue]

I don't figure why you can want transparency in a button ???

[Lee Ambrosius]

You use transparency for the pixels of your image that you don't want to contain any color. This is done so the color assigned in the Windows theme comes through and behaves just like the standard AutoCAD icons.

[Peter A]

ok, much simpler:
start illustrator, photoshop, gimp or any other true graphic software. Remove background layer and save the file as a 24-bit 'png-file'. Possibly you can print a an Autocad-file to a png-file, but I didn't bother to try that. Then do as usual.
This technology is used in flash-animation, skinning of winamp and firefox for instance.

[Lee Ambrosius]

I do understand your process and use it all the time for many things. AutoCAD doesn't support the use of PNG files for toolbar bitmaps, only BMP, RLE or DIB files.