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, as an example all screenshots presented in this manual have been done with the Keramik style available in KDE. 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 the available translations can be downloaded from the following address: http://soft.proindependent.com/translations.html and must be placed in a folder called translations, situated in the same location as the QtiPlot executable, in order to be loaded by the application.

Figure 5.43. The preferences dialog: general parameters for the application.

The preferences dialog: general parameters for the application.

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. If the Update separators in Tables/Matrices is checked, QtiPlot will try to convert all the existing data in your project to these 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 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.

Figure 5.44. The preferences dialog: table options.

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 5.45. The preferences dialog: 2D plot options.

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

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

The fifth 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 5.46. The preferences dialog: 3D plot options.

The preferences dialog: 3D plot options.

Figure 5.47. The preferences dialog: fitting options.

The preferences dialog: fitting options.