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The Appearance section allows you to change the appearance of the data object when it is plotted.
The window lists all data object currently loaded in kst, as well as their type and basic properties. To edit an object, double click on it, or select it and click the <guibutton>Edit</guibutton> button. It will bring up the appropriate edit dialog. Items that have child-vectors can be expanded to list them. Items also have right button context menus with common tasks for the items, such as making curves or power spectra from vectors, or adding curves to plots.
Clicking this button displays a colour chooser dialog box, which can be used to change the colour of
both the lines and points.
Items can also be deleted from this dialog by selecting them and clicking <guibutton>Delete</guibutton>. This will delete the selected item and all items which depend on it. So if you delete a vector, all curves, spectra, historgrams, or equations that depend on it will also be deleted. Be careful, because this can not be undone.
</para>
</listitem>
</varlistentry>
<varlistentry>
<term>
<guilabel>Show points</guilabel>
</term>
<listitem>
<para>
Selecting this checkbox shows the data points used to plot the data object. The drop-down list to the right
allows the shape of the points to be changed.
Clicking the <guibutton>Purge</guibutton> will remove all undisplayed data objects. If deleting an object (and everthing that depends on it) will not change any plots or labels, then it is deleted. Nothing that is displayed is deleted. This can not be undone.
</para>
</listitem>
</varlistentry>
<varlistentry>
<term>
<guilabel>Show lines</guilabel>
</term>
<listitem>
<para>
Selecting this checkbox shows the lines joining the data points for the data object. The thickness of the line
as well as the line style can be changed.
</para>
</listitem>
</varlistentry>
</variablelist>
</sect1>
</sect3>
<sect1 id="datatypes">
<title>Data Types</title>
<sect3 id="curveplacement">
<title>Placement</title>
<para>
The Placement section specifies the plotting location of new plottable data objects.
Plots in &kst; are created by building up objects into the displayed curves. In &kst;, there are 5 major classes:
</para>
<variablelist>
<varlistentry>
<term>
<guilabel>Plot window</guilabel>
</term>
<listitem>
<para>
Specify the window in which to plot the data object. You may create a new window by clicking the <guibutton>New...</guibutton> button.
</para>
</listitem>
</varlistentry>
<varlistentry>
<term>
<guilabel>Place in existing plot</guilabel>, <guilabel>Place in new plot</guilabel>
and <guilabel>Do not place in any plot</guilabel>
</term>
<itemizedlist>
<listitem>
<para>
You can choose whether or not to immediately plot the data object on a new or existing plot. If
<guilabel>Place in new plot</guilabel> is selected, you can also choose to re-arrange the layout of the
plots by selecting <guilabel>re-grid</guilabel> and entering the number of columns to use for the
new layout grid.
Data Sources: these provide Primitives with access to data files.
</para>
</listitem>
</varlistentry>
<varlistentry>
<term>
</term>
<listitem>
<para>
Primitives: These are basic data types, including Strings, Scalars (which are single numbers), Vectors (which are ordered lists of numbers) and Matrices (which are 2D arrays of numbers).
</para>
</listitem>
</varlistentry>
</variablelist>
<para>
Once all the desired settings for the new data object have been set, click the <guibutton>OK</guibutton>
button to create the new data object.
</para>
</sect3>
</sect2>
<sect2 id="editinganddeletingdata">
<title>Editing and Deleting Existing Data Objects</title>
<para>
To edit an existing data object, simply highlight it in the Data Manager window and click the <guibutton>Edit</guibutton>
button. The settings window for the selected object will be displayed. This window is identical to the one displayed
when creating new data objects (with the exception that the Placement section may be absent), so refer to <link linkend="creatingdata">Creating New Data Objects</link> for more information
on the settings and options.
</para>
<para>
To delete a data object, highlight it in the Data Manager window and click the <guibutton>Delete</guibutton> button.
Note that the entry in the <guilabel># Used</guilabel> column for an object must be 0 before the object can be
deleted. The <guilabel># Used</guilabel> column indicates the number of times that a particular data object and its children
(if any) are used by either other data objects or by plots.
Listed below are some consequences of this restriction to keep in mind when attempting to delete data objects.
</para>
<itemizedlist>
<listitem>
<para>
All plottable objects (curves, equations, histograms, power spectra, and images) must be removed from plots before they can be
deleted. An object can be removed from a plot by right-clicking on it in the Data Manager window and selecting the desired
plot from the <guisubmenu>Remove From Plot</guisubmenu> submenu.
Relations: these objects describe how vectors or matrices are displayed in a plot. They include Curves (which display an XY pair of vectors) and Images (which display matrices).
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
All data objects that use a particular data vector must be deleted before the data vector can be deleted.
Data Objects: these classes take Primitives as inputs, process them, and output Primitives. These include Spectra, Histograms, Equations, Fits, Filters, and other Plugins.
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
All children of a parent data object must be unused before the parent data object can be deleted.
View Items: these are objects that can be drawn, and include plots, labels, lines, etc. Plots can display Relations (curves and images). Labels can display Scalars and Strings.
</para>
</listitem>
</itemizedlist>
<para>
After a sequence of deletions and removals of plottable data objects from plots, you may find that there are numerous unused data objects
displayed in the Data Manager. To quickly remove these objects, you can click the <guibutton>Purge</guibutton> button.
As an example of how these various classes work together, consider the example session in the chapter on
<link linkend="filters">Filters</link>. In this session, a curve from a data file was plotted, along with a low pass filtered version of the curve. The resulting data structures are as follows:
</para>
</sect2>
</sect1>
<sect1 id="datatypes">
<title>Data Types</title>
<para>
There are nine main types of data objects in &kst;. Data objects can contain other data objects,
as represented by the tree structure view in the
Data Manager. The following diagram illustrates the relationships between the different data types.
@@ -594,131 +214,49 @@ Data Manager. The following diagram illustrates the relationships between the d
</para>
<para>
As can be seen from the above diagram, the curve, equation, histogram, power spectrum and image data objects
are the only data objects that are plottable. All data objects (other than vectors) have the capability of
using vectors, while equations, power spectra, events, and plugins all contain slave vectors.
The plot displays two curves. One curve takes two data vectors (INDEX and Column 2) as inputs. The other takes INDEX as its X vector, and the ouput vector of the Low Pass Filter as its Y vector. The low pass filter takes the Column 2 vector, and two Scalars as its inputs. The two data vectors get their data from the Data Source.
</para>
<para>
Descriptions of each data type are provided below, along with overviews of the settings and options
available when creating or editing each type of data object. Settings common to almost all data types have been
omitted—see <link linkend="creatingdata">Creating New Data Objects</link> for more information.
</para>
<sect2 id="vectors">
<title>Vectors</title>
<para>
Vectors are one of the most often-used data objects in &kst;. As their name implies, vectors are simply ordered
lists of numbers. Most often they contain the x or y coordinates of a set of data points.
</para>
<!-- TODO: This doesn't seem to be the case here. Check -->
<para>
As vectors can be potentially quite large, it is a good idea to be aware of the amount of memory &kst; has
allocated for use. The current available memory is displayed in the lower right corner of the status bar
of the main &kst; window.
</para>
<tip>
<para>
If the status bar is not available, ensure that <guimenuitem>Show Statusbar</guimenuitem> is checked
in the <guimenu>Settings</guimenu> menu.
</para>
</tip>
<para>
The following is a screenshot of the window displayed when creating or editing vectors. Explanations of the
settings are listed below.
The data manager for this sessions is shown below. Note that the literal scalars [4 (X30)] and [0.05 (X29)] are not listed. To keep things clean, and because '4' is not editable, literal scalars like this are not presented in the UI.
The source file and field to read can be set using the following options.
This structure could have been chained together further. For example, the output of the Filter could have been used as the input to a Histogram, and the Histogram of the output of the filtered data could have been plotted instead.
</para>
<variablelist>
<varlistentry>
<term>
<guilabel>File name</guilabel>
</term>
<listitem>
<para>
The path to the desired data file. Clicking the button to the right displays a file browser
window that can be used to graphically browse to the file.
Descriptions of each data type are provided below, along with overviews of the settings and options
available when creating or editing each type of data object.
</para>
</listitem>
</varlistentry>
<varlistentry>
<term>
<guilabel>Field or column</guilabel>
</term>
<listitem>
<sect2 id="vectors">
<title>Vectors</title>
<para>
The field or column to create a vector from.
Vectors are ordered lists of numbers. They are used as the inputs to Data Object or Curves, where they can be used to define the X or Y axis.
</para>
</listitem>
</varlistentry>
</variablelist>
</sect3>
<sect3 id="datarange">
<title>Data Range</title>
<para>
This section specifies the range of data to use from the selected field for the data vector.
</para>
<variablelist>
<varlistentry>
<term>
<guilabel>Starting frame</guilabel>, <guilabel>Count from end</guilabel>,
<guilabel>Number of frames</guilabel>, and <guilabel>Read to end</guilabel>
</term>
<listitem>
<para>
Using these four settings, the lower and upper boundaries of
the data range can be set. For example, to read from frame 10 to frame 900, enter <userinput>10</userinput> for
<guilabel>Starting frame</guilabel> and <userinput>890</userinput> for <guilabel>Number of frames</guilabel>.
To read from frame 500 to the end of the file, enter <userinput>500</userinput> for <guilabel>Starting frame</guilabel>
and select the <guilabel>Read to end</guilabel> option. To read only the last 450 frames from the file, select the
<guilabel>Count from end</guilabel> option and enter <userinput>450</userinput> for <guilabel>Number of frames</guilabel>.
The combinations used in the previous two examples are often useful for reading data
from a file that is being updated in real time. Subsequent additions to the file are read, causing associated
vectors to be updated as well.
</para>
</listitem>
</varlistentry>
Vectors can come from several places. Data Vectors aquire their data from Data Sources. Generated Vectors are lists of equally spaced numbers. Both Data Vectors and Generated Vectors can be created from the <guimenuitem>Vector</guimenuitem> option in the <guimenu>Create</guimenu> menu, or by selecting the
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