Customising Menu Size, Fonts, Colour and Mouse/Keyboard Behaviour

Is a factor on the overall scale of the display, lying in the range 0.5 to 2.0, default 1.0.

Larger values make the display seem bigger to the software, resulting in smaller menu panels and fonts.
Smaller values increase the size of menu panels, buttons and fonts, and can be useful for the visually impaired.

This factor can be especially useful on "wide screen" displays with very asymmetric horizontal and vertical resolutions.

The operating system *should* determine the physical size of the display correctly. However we have observed a few instances where this does not happen, the symptoms being that fonts and menus appear either far too big or too small and cannot be corrected by using Display Factor . In this situation you may need to tell the software the physical dimensions of your display, and this process is described under Setting the correct physical resolution for your display in the PRIMER manual.

On most displays the "Default" font size will give the best appearance in menu interface panels, but occasionally "Small" or "Large" fonts may look better. It is recommended that you set the Display Factor first in order to get the best overall layout on your display, then adjust the font size if necessary.

Font quality has been improved in D3PLOT 17.0, and on most displays "Proof" quality will look best. However on low resolution displays it may look a little fuzzy due to the anti-aliasing process, and "Anti-alias" (coarser) or "Plain" (not anti-aliased) may give a crisper result.

Font scaling ("Permit scaling") can be useful when your choice of font is a bit too large for the buttons in the user interface, since it allows the default font size to be reduced where text would overflow the space in a button. However it can result in a mixture of font sizes in a panel, which might improve legibility but looks untidy, so it is generally better to choose a Display Factor and Font size that work well together on your display, and turn scaling off.

Cached fonts is an obscure setting that will only apply on Linux systems where the "core" X11 font package has not been loaded, and the software reverts to cached bitmaps. If you have font problems on Linux please contact Oasys Ltd Support for advice and help.

Historically D3PLOT only provided Helvetica, Times and Courier fonts, but in D3PLOT 17.0, a wider range of fonts has been made available.

The default for the User interface is still Helvetica for menu panels (the "Menus font") and Courier for listings (the "Listing font"), but you can use the popup menus to select from any of the fonts on your computer. The range of fonts available will depend both on the operating system and what has been installed, but typically there can be many. To try to make the choice manageable these are separated into

Proportionally spaced fonts, where character width varies. This is preferred for GUI panels with buttons.
Monospaced fonts, where each character width is the same. This is preferred for text listings.

Within each category fonts are also sorted by weight, with "normal" being the most commonly used. "Light" options tend to be narrower, permitting more characters to fit in a button, "Heavy" options tend to use bold text, and can be useful when using very large fonts - perhaps on a projector or when setting up the user interface for someone who is visually impaired.

By default D3PLOT is set up for right-handed usage, which has influence on both mouse buttons and the keyboard "meta" keys: <shift> and <ctrl>. (The left and right meta keys have different functions during dynamic viewing: see dynamic viewing )

You can swap the handedness of mouse and/or meta keys, which will reverse them in the left <=> right sense.

Note : This swapping is local to D3PLOT, and is applied after any system user interface configuration. So if you configure your computer to swap mouse buttons globally, then swap them here, the net effect will be to have unswapped buttons again!

By default D3PLOT uses the following dynamic viewing keyboard + mouse key actions:

However different users have different tastes, and users who swap between different applications find it easier if they behave in similar ways. Therefore the following [permutations are available:

Viewing mode , may be assigned to keyboard meta-key(s) (ie <shift>, <ctrl> or <shift + ctrl>

Normal	will use the current display mode
Wireframe	only the line vectors in the current display mode
Free-edge	special "free edge lines only" display mode

Dynamic rotation options , assigned to mouse buttons

Rotate XYZ	traditional D3PLOT behaviour, rotates in XY if cursor's initial position is in centre 2/3rd of screen, otherwise about Z
Rotate XY	rotates about screen XY only, regardless of where the cursor's initial position
Rotate Z	rotates about screen Z only, regardless of cursor initial position
Rotate Sphere	free rotation about any of XYZ, like grabbing a point in a virtual sphere and dragging it

Dynamic translation options, assigned to mouse buttons

Translate

model follows cursor movement in screen XY plane

Zoom options, assigned to mouse buttons

Zoom (up +ve)	up and to the right enlarge, down and to left reduce
Zoom (down +ve)	down and to the right enlarge, up and to left reduce

The configurations these produce may not match exactly the actions in the given application, but they are the best that can be achieved at the present time with the options available.

This is a special setting designed mainly for "batch" style usage, and it controls how "popup" windows that normally wait for acknowledgement from the user should respond.

If it is switched on then these windows will assume that the user has clicked the default action (usually "OK") and continue operation without waiting. This can be useful when replaying scripts, but it is not recommended for normal interactive usage.