Skip to content
michaelmarty edited this page Oct 11, 2022 · 13 revisions

UniDec has several "hidden" features that I've added in over the years to make life easier. Some of these you may have already discovered, but I wanted to start listing them here as I remembered them.

Fixing the Mass Range

UniDec will automatically remove zeros from the end of the deconvolved mass distribution to save time and make the plots easier to read. Thus, the maximum and minimum mass may vary depending on the parameters. If you want to fix the mass range, simply add a negative sign before the values in the mass range box. Setting the parameters to "-1000" and "-100000" will ensure that you have an x-axis that is exactly 1000 to 100000. This is helpful for comparing plots and preparing nice figures.

Copy Plots to Clipboard

Starting in Version 3.3, clicking on any plot and hitting ctrl+C on the keyboard will copy an image of the plot to the clipboard so you can paste it into other presentation or word processing programs.

Export Data from Plot to Text File

Starting in Version 5, clicking on any plot and hitting ctrl+u on the keyboard will open a Dialog where you can save the data in that plot to a text file.

Middle Clicks on Plots

UniDec has an extensive ability to export figures through the File > Save Figure menu. Typically, it exports all of the figures to the _unidecfiles folder. But, sometimes you want something faster. If you middle click on any plot, it will open a save figure dialog. You can save the figure in any location, and by setting the file extension (figure.png or figure.pdf, for example), you can set the type of file it saves as.

Also, you can use alt + middle click to manually set the x-axis and shift + middle click to manually set the y-axis. This is useful if you want to plot several figures with the same axes.

You can also use ctrl + middle click to adjust the plotting defaults. See Matplotlib rcParams for options. NOTE: You will need to replot for the changes to take effect.

Finally, space + middle click on 1D plots will label the most abundant peaks on each zoom.

Right Click on Mass Spectrum Plot

If you right click on the Mass Spectrum plot, it will enter that zoomed range as the new max and min m/z.

Smashing!

If you zoom into a specific region of the m/z spectrum, hold control, and double right click (read that carefully), you can "smash" that part of the spectrum, meaning it will set it to zero.