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
Here is a figure illustrating the effect of the Postscript commands1 setlinejoin
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.