Visualize Perspective Settings

Displaying the Tool Actions

By default, the tool actions are not displayed. Click on the action toggle (window_icon.gif) to expand the Tool Palette to display the actions. (You can also drag the right border of the Tool Palette to the right to display the actions.)

You can choose to display the tools on the right or left of the actions. The default displays the tools on the left side. To change the orientation to the right side, use the following instructions:

  1. Click the pull-down menu button at the top right of the Tool Palette.
    tool_side.jpg
  2. Select Tools on the Right from the pull-down menu, as shown above.

    3. The Tool Palette now appears with the tools on the right and the actions on the right:
    tool_right.gif

Image Open Preference

In the Visualize perspective, you can double-click images in the Project Explorer to display in the iImage tool. The image variable is also available in the Variables view. You can change this default behavior to create the variable but not automatically visualize it. You might want to change the automatic setting when you want to visualize an image as a map or use the variable in some other way.

  1. To change the preference setting, select Window →  Preferences from the workbench menu.

    2. Note
    For Mac OS, the preferences are listed in the Preferences menu.

    The Preferences dialog appears.

  2. From the list on the left side, click on IDL to view the IDL preferences.
  3. On the right side of the dialog, the File Open Preference contains the Visualize Images On Open check box. Click the check box to disable it.
  4. Click OK.
    VM_prefs..jpg

Now when you double-click on an image in the Project Explorer, the image variable displays in the Variables view, but does not display in iImage.

Customizing the Visualize Perspective

You can customize the views in this perspective to reflect the way you work. All of the views in the perspective can be moved around to any part of the workbench. IDL provides you with a default configuration for each perspective, so that you can reset them to the default settings if you like.

For instructions, see Views.

Saving Files

You can save visualizations as iTool save files, which have a file extension of .isv. Every time you exit an iTool window that has been modified, you will be prompted to save it or to choose not to save. You can also save an iTools window at any time by selecting File  → Save.

You can restore these files at any time from the IDL menu using File → Open File. For complete information, see File Operations for iTools and Exporting and Saving Data.

File Readers and File Writers

If you work with data formats that are not recognized by IDL, you can write your own file reader to tell IDL how to import that data into iTools. File readers in iTools define how IDL interprets different kinds of data. IDL provides many types of file readers, but you can also define your own readers in IDL. For more information, see Adding Custom File Readers.

In the same way, file writers define how IDL exports data to a file. The iTools framework contains many of these file writers. Although it's more difficult to create file writers than it is to create file readers, you can create your own custom file writers. For more information, see Overview of iTools File Writers.