PREFERENCES...
, This window lets you select your preferences for program appearance and functions. Chose one of four tabbed categories: Appearance, Sounds, Fonts,File Handling, and Operations.
Most of these options should be self-explanatory. In general they set what appears in the plot window, and if the program uses sounds to indicate events.
If the data file contains real-time notes (entered while data was being acquired), these are indicated by -- and accessed via -- small buttons labeled 'n' in the plot area. You can have the note buttons appear either at the top or the bottom of the plot area. The change may not occur until a new channel is drawn.
The Lock Toolbar option 'fastens' toolbars to windows, so that if you drag or resize a plot window, it's toolbar moves with it.
The Screen Colors button lets you set the foreground (data), background, and label and marker colors on the plot and block windows.
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.