PREFERENCES...
, This window lets you select your preferences for program appearance and functions. Chose one of four tabbed categories: Appearance, Sounds Fonts, Plots, File Handling, and Operations.
LabAnalyst can draw plots using the modern 'Quartz' method, which is of high visual quality, and the older 'QuickDraw' method, which is of lower visual quality but is much faster for large files or multichannel plots. The default is to use Quartz for drawing operations that won't take very long (e.g., small files) and switch to QuickDraw when Quartz would seem slow, but you can force exclusive use of Quartz if you wish.
The default font for most text output is 'Lucida Grande', which should be found in all OS X systems. If you select Lucida Grande and it isn't present, the program searches for similar common fonts (Tahoma, Arial) and defaults to Geneva if none of these are available.
The embossed text option gives large window labels a '3-D' appearance; the aqua them adds a blue tone, as in early OS X versions. Neither affects program function.
To avoid having to re-set your preferences at every launch, click the ‘Save Current Preferences’ button to store your current settings (including screen colors, current values of FiO2, FiCO2, and RQ, etc.) in a file called ‘LAprefs’. When launched, LabAnalyst looks for this file and reads the preferred settings from it.
Caution: You’ll get unexpected results if you use an ‘LAprefs’ file made with a Power-PC Mac on an Intel Mac, or vice versa. This is because numeric data – such as in the preferences file -- are stored in two formats: ‘big-Endian’ and ‘little-Endian’. Endian-ness is a property of the CPU. Power-PC processors are big-Endian; Intel processors are little-Endian. If you record your preferences on a PPC Mac and then read them on an Intel Mac (or vice versa), you'll get unpredictable results, manifested most obviously as weird screen colors.