Scale Bar Dialog

This dialog box is used to control the drawing of scale bars in most image windows and in the model view window. The length of a bar is automatically set to a round number (usually, 1, 2 or 5 times a power of ten) in the units of the pixel size defined in the model header. The dialog is opened from the Edit menu of the 3dmod Information window, or from the View menu of the Model View window when the program is started as 3dmodv.

The settings in this windows are stored between invocations of 3dmod along with the user preferences, rather than in a model file. The settings are:

At the bottom of the dialog appears a list of actual scale bar lengths in whatever windows are open. Values are shown for the most recently active (top) Zap, Slicer, and Multi-Z windows, as well as for the XYZ and Model View windows if they are open.

Montage snapshots: You may need to adjust the scale bar properties if you want to take a high-resolution montage snapshot of the Zap or Model View windows. Scale bar size and indentation are automatically scaled up by the montaging factor so that the bar will appear proportionally the same in the snapshot as in the original window. However, this scaled up bar must be located entirely in one of the montage panels (e.g., in the bottom right quarter of the window if montaging by 4). If the bar does not fit in a panel with the properties that you have set, the program will first try to shift the bar toward the corner of the image by reducing the indentation in the direction of the bar length (X for a horizontal bar). If that change is not sufficient, it then tries to shorten the bar by reducing the minimum length of the bar in pixels to as little as half of the original setting. A message is printed indicating either that such changes were made, or that the bar cannot be drawn with the current settings. In the latter case, or if you do not like the changes that were made, you can adjust the settings yourself to position the bar completely within one panel.

In any case, the actual length of the scale bar for the montage is printed on the terminal, since it is possible for the length to be different from that in the original window.

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