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The configuration panel

The configuration panel allows you to change Ipe's behavior during an editing session. This can be useful when editing unusual figures or documents, or when you need some extraordinary behavior. However, the settings made in the configuration panel are volatile. Once you leave Ipe, everything you have modified here disappears. To make lasting changes to Ipe's behavior, you should change your X resources.

  The configuration panel has four fields. One field contains boxes to set the Print command, Preview command, LaTeX preamble and Postscript preamble. All these are related to the way in which Ipe previews and prints the drawing from within Ipe. Note that you have to enter the print and preview commands with a dummy file name %s. When Ipe calls these commands, the %s is replaced by the actual name of the Postscript file. It is useful to end both commands with an ampersand (&). Then, Ipe will not have to wait until the previewer or printing process terminates.

  The Postscript preamble has not been described before. It can be used to put a piece of Postscript code at the beginning of the Postscript part of the Ipe picture. It will be executed within the Ipedict environment, but before processing the image. It is provided to make it easy to change Postscript parameters like linejoin, linecap, or miterlimit for a drawing. Drawings containing sharp angles sometimes look nicer when round line joins are used. This can be achieved by setting the Postscript preamble to

1 setlinejoin
Here is a figure illustrating the effect of the Postscript commands setlinecap and setlinejoin. Note that even if you specify a miter join, angles that are sharper than a certain threshold will be drawn as bevel joins. (You can set the threshold using setmiterlimit--see your Postscript manual.) The LaTeX and Postscript preambles are saved with your drawing. When the drawing is loaded back, the previously set preambles will appear in the boxes in the configuration panel. (The setting in the X resources is only used when creating new files or when the drawing does not contain a preamble.)

  For the preview command and the LaTeX preamble there are two different defaults in the X resources, one for ipe mode, one for mipe mode. Whenever you load a new file, the boxes will be set to the correct X resources entry.

  The second field contains two sliders labeled Mark size and Arrow size. They can not only be used to determine the size of marks and arrows that you plan to create, but also to change the size of already existing objects. Whenever you move a slider all selected objects of the correct type will be resized.

The third field of the configuration panel contains two sliders to change the Select distance and the Snap distance, see Selection and context snapping. The distance is given in Postscript points, i.e. 1/72 of an inch or roughly 1/3 of a millimeter. Note that these are screen distances on your physical screen (the glass surface in front of you).

The last field contains several buttons that enable or disable certain behaviors of Ipe.

 

Interior select
If on, you can select a filled object by clicking in its interior. If off, you have to click near the boundary, see selecting objects .
Latex boxes
If on, Ipe will run a background LaTeX process to figure out the size of a bounding box for text objects. If off, Ipe will compute a bounding box based on the screen representation, see text objects.
Undo
If on, you can undo up to 16 editing steps. If off, you cannot undo anything. This can be useful when editing very large drawings.
Fifi cursor
This button determines whether Ipe displays a secondary cursor showing the current snapping position.
Zoom & Pan
If on, panning or zooming in Ipe's window will effect the same operation on the Ghostscript window of the previewer. If off, the preview window will only be modified when you call preview.
Stroke
If on, then the boundary of filled objects will be outlined in the current stroke color. If off, then an object will only be outlined if it is unfilled. Note that (poly)lines, splines, and circular arcs will always be outlined but not filled, unless the stroke color is "empty".
3 Spline
If on, then the first and last control point of a splines (not a splinegon) are automatically given multiplicity three. If off, all control points have multiplicity one by default.

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