The QtiPlot Handbook
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# Preferences Dialog

The preference dialog is used to customize the application. It has six different tabs. If you confirm your changes to the default behaviour of the application, the changes are saved and stored imediatelly.

The first icon can be selected to change the General options of the application. In the first tab: Application, the style is the general decoration used for the windows. It defines the aspect of the buttons and dialog boxes. The available styles are part of the Qt library. The font is the general font used for the GUI (menus, dialogs, etc), it doesn't apply to the plots. You can select the language of the application in the corresponding combo-box. All translations available can be downloaded from the following address: http://soft.proindependent.com/translations.html. By default the translations must be place in a folder called translations, situated in the same location as the QtiPlot executable, in order to be loaded by the application, but you can specify a different folder via the File Locations tab.

Figure 5-48. The preferences dialog: general parameters for the application.

The Matrix Undo Stack Size is the number of operations that can be undone/redone when working on a matrix. By default it is set to ten operations. A high value for this parameter can be very costly in terms of memory consumption, especially for large matrices.

The Endline character defines the end of line convention used by QtiPlot for copy/paste operations and for exporting matrices/tables to ASCII files. The end of line convention can be: Line Feed (LF), Carriage Return + Line Feed (CRLF) or Carriage Return (CR) only.

Starting with version 0.9.6, autocompletion is enabled by default in all QtiPlot editors: in Notes, in the Script Window and in the values dialogs for matrices and tables. The autocompletion mechanism is based on a list of words provided by the qti_wordlist.txt file. This file, which is shipped with the source archive, must be placed in the same folder as the Python configuration files (see File Locations tab bellow), and is automatically loaded by QtiPlot on start-up. You can edit this file and add your own key words: one word per line. Completion suggestions are automatically poped-up for words that have more than two characters, but you can trigger autocompletion at any time using the shortcut Ctrl+U. Autocompletion can be disabled by unchecking the Enable autocompletion option.

The second tab of the General option set is used to disable the prompting on deleting project windows. Also you can disable the warnings prompted by default when renaming new table windows with names already used in the current project.

In this tab, you can change the default color for the workspace of the application. You can also choose the background color and the text color for panels. The panels are the Log Window and the Project explorer.

The Numeric Format tab allows you to customize the characters used as decimal point and as thousands separator. By default, QtiPlot uses the locale settings detected on your system. QtiPlot will convert all the existing data in your project to the new settings when you click the Apply button. The Number of Decimal Digits specifies the default precision used for any calculations operated on your data in Tables/Matrices.

The File Locations tab allows you to define custom locations for the folders containing the translation files, the manual files and the Python configuration files, qtiplotrc.py and qtiUtil.py, in case QtiPlot was built with Python scripting support.

Figure 5-49.

The second set of option allows to customize the defaut aspect of tables: background, text colors, and fonts for tables and labels. By checking the Display Comments in Header option, the column comments will also be displayed in the table header, bellow the column names. If the Automatically Recalculate Column Values option is checked, all modifications in the values of a column trigger a recalculation of all columns with formulas depending on the modified column.

Figure 5-50. The preferences dialog: table options.

The second set of options is used to customize the default aspect of 2D plots. The first tab is used to modify some general options. Most of the changes made to these options will be applied only to the newly created plots. Only a few of the changes, like Autoscaling of the plot axes, Antialising of curves and the behavior on resize events will also affect the already existing plots.

Figure 5-51. The preferences dialog: 2D plot options.

The second tab named Curves defines the default style used when you create a new plot.

The third tab named Axes allows you to specify which plot axes will be displayed in a new layer and the main aspect parameters of an axis.

The fourth tab named Ticks defines the default style for the ticks of the axes used when you create a new plot.

The fifth tab named Fonts defines the default fonts used when you create a new plot.

The last tab named Print allows you to define the default options used when printing 2D plots. If you want the layers to be printed with their original dimensions, you must be sure to uncheck the option Scale layers to paper size. By checking the Print Cropmarks option you ensure that some visible marks are drawn around the borders of the plot.

The following tab allows to customize the aspect of three dimensional plots. From this dialog you have the possibility to define a speed drawing mode, which is very usefull when working with large data sets. This can be realized via the Resolution option: the higher this value, the smaller the number of data points drawn on the 3D plots, therefore the higher the drawing speed. For a value of 1, all the data points are drawn.

Figure 5-52. The preferences dialog: 3D plot options.

The Notes tab allows the user to customize some default options for the text editors, such as the length of the TAB character and the font. The user can also specify whether the line numbers should be displayed or not. Displaying the line numbers can be particularly helpful when debugging Python scripts.

Figure 5-53. The preferences dialog: note options.

Figure 5-54. The preferences dialog: fitting options.

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