The XImtool Control Panel

The XImtool control panel is the main interface for the XImtool display program, on which SAOtng is based. The SAOtng GUI duplicates the most of the functionality of the control panel in its menu and accel buttons, but the control panel is offered as a window-based alternative to run-of-the-mill menus.

Contents of This Section

• View Controls
• Color Controls
• Blink Controls
• Options:
  • Panner
  • Magnifier
  • Screen Coords
  • Tile Frames
  • Auto Switching
  • Warnings
  • Autoscale
  • Antialiasing

View Controls

The Frame box will list the frame buffers you currently have defined. Currently, only frames 1-4 are listed.

The text display window gives the field X,Y center, X,Y scale factors, and the X,Y zoom factors. The scale factor and the zoom factor will be the same unless autoscale is enabled (IRAF tv/display only). The scale is in units of display pixels per frame buffer pixel, and is an absolute measure.

The numbers in the Zoom box are zoom factors. Black numbers zoom, white numbers dezoom. The Zoom In and Zoom Out buttons are used to change the zoom by factors of 2. The Center button re-centers the image without changing the zoom factor. Toggle Zoom toggles between the current zoom/center values, and the unzoomed image.

Aspect recomputes the view so that the aspect ratio is 1.0.

Flip X and Flip Y flip the frame.

Clear destroys the current image and erases the frame.

Fit Frame makes the display window the same size as the frame buffer. In general, this means that the display window can be resized smaller than the 512x512 space it occupies in the overall SAOtng window, but it cannot become larger. To make it larger, use the resize capabilities of your window manager.

Color Controls

At the top is a scrolled list of all the available colormaps. Click on the one you want to load it.

The three sliders adjust the contrast (upper slider), brightness (middle slider), and max contrast (lower slider) of the display.

The Invert button inverts the colormap (multiples the contrast by -1.0).

Blink Controls

• Blink frames is the list of frames to be blinked. When blink mode is in effect ximtool just cycles through these frames endlessly, pausing "blink rate" seconds between each frame. The same frame can be entered in the list more than once. To program an arbitrary list of blink frames, hit the Reset button and click on each blink frame button until it is set to the desired frame number.
• The Blink Rate can be adjusted as slow or as fast as you want using the arrow buttons. If you set the blink rate small enough it will go to zero, enabling single step mode (see below).
• The Register button registers all the blink frames with the current display frame. Frames not in the blink list are not affected.
• The Match LUTs button sets the colors of all blink frames to the same values as the display frame. Frames not in the blink list are not affected.
• The Blink button turns blink on and off. When the blink rate is set to zero the Blink button will single step through the blink frames, one frame per button press.

NOTE: you can blink no matter what ximtool options are in effect, but many of these will slow blink down. To get the fastest blink you may want to turn off the panner and coords box, and match the LUTs of all the blink frames. All the ximtool controls are fully active during blink mode, plus you can load frames etc.

Options:

Panner

Turn on/off the panner on the image window. This option is linked to the Magnifier option, so that turning on the Panner will turn off the Magnifier.

Magnifier

Turn on/off the magnifier on the image window. This option is linked to the Panner option, so that turning on the Magnifier will turn off the Panner.

Screen Coords

Turn on/off the WCS display on the image. Note that coordinates always are displayed in the Control Panel.

Warnings

The warnings options toggles whether you see warning dialog boxes in situations like overwriting an existing file, clearing the frame buffer, quitting, etc.

Tile Frames

The default display mode is to view one frame at a time. In tile frames mode, 2 or 4 frames may be viewed simultaneously in the display window. All the usual operations (zoom and pan, colortable enhancement, cursor readback, etc.) still work for each frame even when in tile frames mode.

Auto Switching

When in tile mode, this button determines whether the frame will change as the mouse is moved from one frame to another. Its a cute idea, but it gets annoying after a while, so the default is not to switch automatically.

Autoscale

If autoscale is enabled then at zoom=1, the frame buffer will be automatically scaled to fit within the display window. With autoscale disabled (the default), the image scale is more predictable, but the image may be clipped by the display window, or may not fill the display window.

Antialiasing

When dezooming an image, i.e., displaying a large image in a smaller display window, antialiasing causes all the data to be used to compute the displayed image. If antialiasing is disabled then image is subsampled to compute the displayed image. Antialiasing can prevent subsampling from omitting image features that don't fall in the sample grid, but it is significantly slower than dezooming via subsampling. The default is no antialising.

WCS

Display WCS coordinates and pixel value as the mouse is moved across the image. This duplicates the function of the WCS window on the image itself and is made available for cases where you do not want to clutter the image with the WCS display. Note that this window is selectable so that you can cut and paste the current WCS display values.

[This XImtool Control Panel page is a modified version of the XImtool documentation available from NOAO, to whom grateful acknowledgment is made.]

Last Updated June 14, 1997