Keyboard Shortcuts for XMetaL 9.0?

[KristaFechner]

In XMetaL Enterprise 9.0, I no longer see underlined shortcut characters in the top-level menu items. I do see shortcut characters underlined in the submenus, but without them at the top level, authors will have to guess at which key in the shortcut sequence to use first. Also, I have run through the list of Alt keys, and I cannot find one that opens our authoring bridge menu (we have just upgraded to SDL LiveContent Architect 2014). We used to have a visible shortcut key (Alt+S) on that, but now that shortcut opens a dialog box called “About XMetaL Services”.
I am currently using XMetaL on a Windows 8.1 virtual machine.

Is there any way that I can add a shortcut key to our bridge menu?
Thanks for any help you can provide.

Krista

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[Derek Read]

Starting with version 8 we incorporated a new menu library from Microsoft. It does not implement an underlining feature for the menus. If Microsoft releases an updated version that includes the underlining feature we will likely update our software to include it.

The keyboard shortcut Alt+S was chosen to activate the “XMetaL Services” feature in XMetaL Author version 8. This is an undocumented feature and therefore seldom used, except perhaps in cases where XMetaL Support might ask someone to change a setting in there. Selecting Alt+S was likely a poor choice for something so infrequently accessed and so I will suggest to development that we consider changing it for the next release. If you need an immediate fix you might ask SDL to select a different letter for their implementation so that it does not conflict with this built-in feature.

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[sdl_user]

Just upgraded to XMetal 9.0 and noticed this same issue. For anyone else reading this thread, my solution was to remove Alt+S as the key to trigger “About Services”.

1. Open C:Program Files (x86)XMetaL 9.0AuthorStartUp__xmau_services.mcr.
2. Search for “Alt+S”.
3. Remove the text 'key=”Alt+S”' in the XMetaL Configuration: About Services macro. (On line 425 in my file.)

Before:

After:

4. Save the file.
5. Restart XMetaL.
6. Use Alt+S to access the SDL Live Content menu!

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[Derek Read]

Starting with XMetaL Author Enterprise 10 the shortcut to activate the XMetaL Services feature has been reassigned the less-likely-to-conflict shortcut key combination Alt+Shift+X.

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