Halo menus - 2D and 3D

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(Go to:Topicscape Pro User Guide - contents list)

Hover your cursor over a topic and the Halo menu appears, giving immediate access to eight controls. The Halo menu shows on topics everywhere: Rectangles, cones, pyramids, topics in the Hit or History lists and in the Tag Pool. This is aimed at new Topicscape users and brings often-used controls into a highly visible position. After you find your way around, you may want to turn it off.

Above are examples of the 2D and 3D Halos. This menu also has built-in dynamic help, as you can see in the image on the lower right. Hover your cursor over an icon and the blue help bubble explains the icon's purpose and shows the topic's name.

If you select a topic, its Halo menu will disappear until you move the cursor away and back again to hover over the topic.

Bear in mind that if you choose "Search this topic group", your search will look in only the topic on which the halo appears and all its descendants. To remind you that you have requested a search limited to a topic group, Topicscape shows an orange border round the search-term box. For a full search, you just start typing the search terms, as you do now.

Two of the icons have several useful capabilities on hover:

1. Hover over the 'Enter Topic Center' icon (ringed in red in the illustration, right) instead of clicking on it and you will see a simple list of the contents.
   - You can click on an item on that list to open it, if it has a file attached.
   - You can hover over an item on that list to see a preview of the file, if it is of a file-type with preview supported by Windows.
2. Hover over the Tag icon and you will see the tags assigned to that topic.

Turning the Halo menu on and off

There are checkboxes in the help bubble that let you to suppress the Halo Help or the Halo menu itself. Switching them on again is done from the Options panel: Tools | Options | User Preferences | Enhanced Menus

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