7.4 Setting the Display Properties of Centroids and Planes

Centroids and planes have several display properties, viz. colour; transparency (i.e. whether you can see through the object or not); label (i.e. what the object is called); whether the label is displayed or not; whether the centroid or plane itself is displayed or hidden. These properties may be set in several ways:

Method 1:

Choose Calculate from the top-level menu and Centroids... or Planes... from the next menu.

The resulting dialogue box lists the current set of centroids or planes, e.g.

Left-click on the required centroid or plane and hit Edit...

Use the resulting Properties dialogue box to set the desired display properties. Clicking on the coloured panel will open the Select Color dialogue box which can be used for customising colours (see Section 6.5.2).

In the example below, the user has set Show on (i.e. the object will be displayed, not hidden), the label on (i.e. a label MY PLANE will be displayed), the transparency off (i.e. the plane will be opaque) and the colour to green:

For planes, the Properties dialogue box is also accessible by choosing Calculate from the top-level menu, Packing/Slicing... from the pull-down menu, selecting the required plane by clicking on the down-arrow next to the box labelled Plane in the Packing and Slicing dialogue, and then hitting the Edit... button.

Method 2:

Right-click on the plane or centroid in the display area, select Colours, Labels or Show/Hide as required, then select the desired option.

For example:

Selecting Label followed by Edit label... will allow you to type in a new name for the object.

Selecting Colours followed by Blue will turn the object blue.

Selecting Show/Hide followed by Hide will undisplay the object.

Selecting Colours followed by Colour... will open the Select Color dialogue box which can be used for customising colours (see Section 6.5.2).

Method 3:

Choose Display from the top-level menu, then select Labels, Colours or Show/hide in the pull-down menu, depending on which property you wish to alter.

Select either Centroids... or Planes... from the next menu.

The resulting dialogue box lists the current set of centroids or planes:

For colours, left-click on the item in the list that you wish to change. This will open the Select Color dialogue box which you can use to choose the required colour (see Section 6.5.2).

For labels and show/hide, set the Action buttons to the required setting and then left-click on the item in the list that you wish to change.

Alternatively, right-clicking on an item in the list will produce the menus described above under Method 2.

Note: Changes made to the colour and/or size of centroid and plane labels will be applied to all labels in the display (i.e. all atom, centroid, plane and unit cell axes labels) (see Section 6.2.5).