making a Menu

I believe you have to owner-draw the menu. To do this, set the OWNERDRAW property to TRUE for each menu item. Then implement the ONDRAWITEM and ONMEASUREITEM events. Rather than draw each item manually, I create a single DRAWITEM event and point each menuitem to it. The SENDER object is the menu item (you can get its text from there), and the e parameter has a GRAPHICS object that you can draw on. I do the same thing with ONMEASUREITEM. If you want, you don't even have measure each string, you can just return two constants: e.Width = 150; e.Height = 12; Here's an example. Just point all your menu items to the same DRAWITEM event and MEASUREITEM event, and you're done. private void menuItem_DrawItem(object sender, System.Windows.Forms.DrawItemEventArgs e) { drawmenuitem(sender, e); } private void drawmenuitem(object sender, System.Windows.Forms.DrawItemEventArgs e) { //Create a menuitem from sender MenuItem mi = (MenuItem) sender; //define a margin int margin = 20; //get a graphics Graphics g = e.Graphics; //get a font Font f = new Font("Courier New", 8, FontStyle.Italic); //get a navy background brush Brush nb = (Brush) Brushes.Navy; //get a gray background brush Brush gb = (Brush) Brushes.Gray; //get a foreground brush Brush fb = (Brush) Brushes.Red; //should it be highlighted? if (e.State == (e.State | DrawItemState.Selected)) { //fill the background of the item to show a highlight g.FillRectangle(nb, e.Bounds.Left, e.Bounds.Top, e.Bounds.Width, e.Bounds.Height); } else { //fill the background with gray g.FillRectangle(gb, e.Bounds.Left, e.Bounds.Top, e.Bounds.Width, e.Bounds.Height); //fill the background only in the margin with navy g.FillRectangle(nb, e.Bounds.Left, e.Bounds.Top, margin, e.Bounds.Height); } //draw a caption. g.DrawString(mi.Text, f, fb, e.Bounds.Left + margin+8, e.Bounds.Top); } private void menuItem_MeasureItem(object sender, System.Windows.Forms.MeasureItemEventArgs e) { e.ItemHeight = 12; e.ItemWidth = 200; }