Overview:
The VAPOR GUI User Preferences panel is accessed from the Edit menu, under "Edit User Preferences". The User Preferences panel allows users to make a number of settings, most of which are self-explanatory. There are tooltips and context-sensitive help to explain these settings. However several settings are very important to note:
The Cache Size (Megabytes) setting determines the maximum amount of system memory that will be allocated to the disk cache. By default this is set to 1024, i.e. one gigabyte; however this should be set to approximately the amount of system memory that is available to you. Care should be taken in adjusting this parameter. If too small, larger data sets will not be able to be processed. If too large, VAPOR GUI may consume too many system resources and overall performance of the computing platform may suffer.
The checkbox "Lock Window Width, Height" allows users to prescribe the full vaporgui window size in pixels. This is useful if it is desired to have a repeatable window size, such as for capturing multiple animation sequences that are exactly the same size. When the window size is locked or unlocked, it will not take effect until the preferences are saved and vaporgui is restarted. Note that the full window size is not the same as the visualizer (or captured image) size. If it is necessary to know the image size that corresponds to the current vaporgui window size, this can be determined by setting the "VAPOR_DEBUG" environment variable. On startup, the informational message "New window size A x B" will be reported where A is the width and B is the height in pixels of the rendering window.
The Message Logging and Popups section is useful for limiting or allowing error, warning, and diagnostic messages to appear, either in a log file, or as a popup in the user interface. You can specify how many times you want a given message to appear, either in the log file or as a popup, before it is silenced. After messages have been silenced they can be resumed by clicking the "Resume All Messages" button. Read the section "Controlling Error, Warning, and Diagnostic Messages" for more information
At the top of the User Preferences Panel is a button "Session Defaults". When this button is clicked, the User Preferences panel is expanded to include a number of default settings, that will be used to initialize the VAPOR GUI at startup. These include for example the default number of bits used in volume visualization, and the default directories where various files (e.g. session, metadata, images, transfer functions, flow, python) are written.
By default, the user preferences are saved in and retrieved from the file ".vapor_prefs" in the user's HOME directory, as identified by the "HOME" environment variable. If HOME is not set, then the preferences are saved in the share/examples subdirectory of VAPOR_HOME (where vapor was installed). Users may override these defaults by setting the environment variable "VAPOR_PREFS_DIR" to be the absolute path of the directory where the preferences will be saved.
Quadratic Interpolation can be set as the vertical interpolation technique when the standard linear interpolation falls short of a user's needs. This is useful on some grids that have an increasing distance between vertical levels as elevation increases. Note that data must be re-loaded before these changes will be in effect.
