Figure 4.6 show’s nip2’s main image processing window. The centre area is the workspace, the left-hand area is a pane you can reveal to write custom definitions for this workspace (see View / Workspace Definitions), and the right-hand pane is the toolkit browser (see View / Toolkit Browser).
Drag with the middle mouse button to scroll the workspace window. Drop a file on to the workspace background (from your file manager) to load that file. If you right-click on the workspace background, a useful menu will appear.
If you select one of these image processing operations, nip2 will apply that operation to the bottom few items in the current column (however many are necessary — two items for Math / Arithmetic / Add, for example), or alternatively, if you have selected some objects explicitly, it will try to apply the operation to the selected objects. See §4.3.3. As you move the mouse pointer over menu items nip2 tries to display some helpful information about the operation, including the number and type of arguments the operation expects.
If you left-click on the label, it changes to display the space nip2 has free internally for performing calculations. You can change this limit in the Preferences workspace. Click again to switch back to disc free.
If you have objects selected, this area changes to show the names of the selected objects.
Columns are split into a number of areas:
The items in the menu let you edit the caption, select all the objects in the column, make a new column which is a copy of this column, save the column to a file, convert the column into a menu item (see §4.3.6) and remove the whole column.
2 + 2
A1 + 120 "My cat likes\nlasagne" fred = 12 |
The last example shows custom button name creation. Normaly nip2 will pick a name for you, but you can chose your own.
A column holds a number of rows. Each row comes in four main parts, not all of which are visible for all row values. Rows which represent classes have a pair or up/down arrows to the left of the row name button which you can use to control which parts of the row are visible.
If you double-left-click on the row name button, nip2 will pop up a viewer or dialog box for the value of the row. If you left-click, nip2 will select that row and deselect all other rows. If you click on an empty space in the workspace, it will deselect all rows. If you Ctrl-left-click, nip2 will toggle selection of that row. If you select one row and then Shift-left-click on another row in the same column it will select the second row and all the rows in between. If you drag with the left button, you can change the order of rows in a column. Hold down the right mouse button for a useful menu. If you let the mouse linger over a button, a useful tooltip will appear.
Alternatively, selecting View / Show Formula toggles between displaying values for objects and displaying the formula.
nip2 changes the background colour of the row name button to show the state of the row. If background colours are not visible (perhaps your theme turns them off), try turning on the Display LEDs in workspace option in Preferences.
Green means the row is selected (click on the background to unselect), red indicates an error (right-click on the row button ans select Recalculate to see the full text of the error), brown indicates that the row value is out of date and needs recalculating and the various blues indicate parent and child relationships.
There are three ways you can apply image processing operations to objects in your workspace:
You can select additional objects with Ctrl-left-click and Shift-left-click. This is necessary if you want to use an image processing operation that takes more than one argument.
Once you have selected the rows (sometimes you need to select them in a certain order), click on the processing operation you want from the Toolkits menu.
If you select a number of rows and then click Edit / Group, nip2 will group the rows together. Now if you select the group and click on an item in the Toolkits menu, nip2 will apply that operation to every item in the group. You can group groups, and you can mix grouped and non-grouped rows freely.
If you save a group, nip2 will write each item in the group to a separate file, incrementing the filename each time.
If an object in your workspace has an error (for example, if you are trying to join two images of different types), then the object name button will turn red to show that this object contains an error and the tooltip for the button will show the error message.
If you make a column that does something useful, you can make it into a menu item by following these steps:
Add a comment by typing your text (enclosed in double quotes) into the line at the bottom of the column. Left-drag the row to the right place.
This will open up a new dialog box which you can use to set a name for your new menu item and the name of the top level menu the item should be added to.