OK, this seems to be a funny discussion between me and myself, still somebody might profit from it.
I finally succeded getting rid of my cowardice and rolling up my sleeves. I managed to get Dennis' Toolbar Editor to work - the problem was in downloading Microsoft .Net 2.0 Framework, which apparently requires Internet Explorer while I was stubbornly trying to do it with Netscape; then everything run smoothly, it's a great utility. Thanks again, Dennis!
Fully ignorant of TCL as I am, after some tampering I got to learn
what the single strings did, although not
how or
why (more or less the way physicians have been using aspirin for nearly a century), and finally produced the attached '
toolby.tcl' that, when placed in the AC3D scripts folder, seems to solve part of the problems mentioned in my previous post: the "SnapV" button nicely snaps two objects together without having to fumble through the menus, and the FullMerge button merges them, snaps the common vertices together by distance (the latter must be previously set by hand once forever), optimizes vertices, optimizes surfaces - a silly but effective macro.
I found no way to get rid of the two pop-up windows that tell how many vertices and surfaces have been removed, but pressing 'Enter' twice is no big deal.
Still combining together all co-planar surfaces of the resulting object requires something better than my blind script-fumbling: some vertices may not be shared between contiguous surfaces (e.g. if one surface is shorter), other surfaces may lay in the same plane and be contiguous but produce weird results if combined together (e.g. if the resulting surface had a hole in the middle), and so on. To be done properly this would take plenty of intelligent programming.
Andy, you still there?