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Preferences
What You Will Learn
- To set up and save preferences
- The basics of the graphical user interface in the SDL Suite, operated from the mouse and the keyboard. You will learn to:
What Are Preferences for?
Before starting creating your first SDL diagram, you should set up some preferences to match your computer environment. These preferences affect the default behavior of the SDL Suite tools and should be adjusted to convenient values in order to have SDL Suite function properly (most options may be set as preferences). When SDL Suite is installed, the factory settings are used as preference settings. Your system manager may have already prepared the environment for you; good advice is to check this anyway.
At least the following should be checked:
Displaying and Changing Preferences
To view and possibly change the preferences:
- From the Organizer's Tools menu, select the Preference Manager command. The Preference Manager window is displayed:
Your next task will be to check and, if required, modify a few preferences.
Help Preferences
The SDL Suite supports a context-sensitive online help facility that you may use at any moment to request help on a window, on a command, on a dialog etc.
On UNIX the online help is in HTML-format and you may use Firefox, Netscape Navigator or Internet Explorer as help viewer. You can change the help viewer by setting a preference.
To set up the Help preferences:
Locate the icon titled Help and double-click it.
Locate the preference HelpViewer.
- Change the preference by selecting the HelpViewer icon and then selecting a new viewer in the option menu at the bottom of the window. (You may need to ask your system manager if you do not know what viewer to use).
The icon will turn gray, which means that the preference has been changed and needs to be saved.
- Depending on your choice of viewer, you should now check that the command used when starting the help viewer is correct, according to your computer environment:
- Collapse the Help icon by double-clicking it.
You have now learned how to work with graphical lists. Graphical lists are used extensively throughout the tools; they may hold as many levels as required (the Preference Manager uses three levels of indentation, as seen on the screen).
Some tools also support a vertical tree as an alternative to a graphical list. The functionality is identical, only the presentation differs. You will acquaintance yourself with a graphical tree later in this tutorial.
Setting the Default Printer
In this tutorial, you will learn how to print diagrams. Before you start printing, you should check and, if needed, set up your print preferences in accordance to your computer environment.
To set up the Print preferences:
- Locate the Print icon. Expand it.
- Locate the PrinterCommand preference. Adjust it to an adequate value (if required, ask your system manager). You may specify any suitable operating system command, for instance sending the resulting printouts to a printer queue (the command lpr) or previewing a PostScript file in a pre-viewer such as Ghostview1.
- Locate the PaperFormat preference. The SDL Suite supports a number of predefined paper sizes on the option menu (A4, A3, US Letter and US Legal). You may also specify an arbitrary UserDefined value, in which case you also need to specify the preferences UserDefinedWidth and UserDefinedHeight; these values are expressed in millimeters.
- Adjust, if required, the preferences MarginUpper, MarginLower, MarginLeft and MarginRight. These preferences govern how much space in millimeters will be reserved for the margins on the printed pages; you may use this space for including headers and footers in your printouts.
- Adjust, if required, the preference Landscape to on or off (this preference specifies the orientation, landscape or portrait).
Setting the Drawing Area Size
When editing SDL diagrams, the pages are assigned a predefined size. You should specify the default size to match the size of the printer pages and the printer margins that you defined in the previous exercise.
- Locate the SDL Editor icon (at the very top), expand it and inspect the preferences PageWidth and PageHeight.
- If required, adjust these preferences to suitable values.
Saving the Preferences
You should now save your preference settings for future sessions.
- Select the Save command from the File menu.
Alternatively, you may click the quick button for Save. Quick buttons are located in a tool bar which may be found immediately beneath the menu bar. Quick buttons are mouse accelerators for frequent commands and are available in all SDL Suite and TTCN Suite tools, not only in the Preference Manager.
- You may "preview" the functionality that a quick button provides by pointing on the quick button; the status bar (situated at the bottom of the window) displays an explanatory text. If you let the mouse pointer rest on the quick button, a short "tool tip" text is also displayed just below the button.
- Another possibility is to type the keyboard accelerator for the Save command, by pressing <Ctrl+S>. This is indicated immediately to the right of the menu choice Save.
- You will receive a warning that the preferences you have changed will not take effect until the individual tools are restarted (exited and started again). Just click OK to acknowledge this.
- Close the Preferences window by selecting the Exit command from the File menu.
This concludes your Preference session. You may of course at any moment go back to the Preference Manager and adjust other preferences.
1Ghostview: A user interface for ghostscript. 1992 Timothy O. Theisen.
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