This window allows you to display a series of spectra from the global list, one after the other. It is possible to display these into an existing plot, that may already be displaying other spectra you’d like to use for comparison, or you can use a new plot.
With careful control of the plotting options you can display into a plot with fixed data ranges, or see each spectrum plotted as autoscaled.
It is also possible to use this window to generate a series of JPEG or PNG images that you could combine into a movie of some kind.
Global list of spectra:
As in the browser window this is a view of the spectra currently stored in the global list. Initially all the spectra in the list are selected, but you may modify which spectra to animate by creating your own selection (reminder: the combination of shift-left-mouse click selects the range between the last selected row and the current position, and the combination control-left-mouse click, either adds the current row to the selection, or removes it, if already selected).
Animation controls:
The Delay: field accepts a decimal number of seconds to pause between displaying
the selected spectra. You can modify this during an animated sequence by pressing
the <Return>
key.
The Loop forever: checkbox determines whether the animation sequence is restarted when all the selected spectra have been displayed. If set then you need to press the Stop button to stop the animation.
The Plot: drop-down list contains a list of all the currently available plots and the
special entry Create
. If the Create
option is chosen then a new plot will be created
to display the animation, otherwise the animation will take place in the selected
plot.
The Scaling option: radio buttons control how a spectrum is scaled when it is displayed.
The Current spectrum label just displays the name of the spectrum currently being added to the target plot. This information is repeated in the plot itself as the spectrum becomes the current one in the plot and is named in the Displaying: label.
The Start, Pause and Stop buttons do what is expected.
Capture controls
The capture controls are for creating a series of JPEG or PNG images of the plot as it
displays each spectrum. To enable (after getting the required effect using the Animation
controls) just click on the Start capture: check box. The output file names will
start with what name you type into the Basename for graphics files: entry
and have an integer number appended, plus the file type .jpg
or .png
. So a
default sequence would be SPLAT0.jpg
, SPLAT1.jpg
, SPLAT2.jpg
,... You’ll then
need to find some software to convert these into a movie. The ImageMagick
convert
command (when suitably configured) will convert these files into an
MPEG or animated GIF. The image below was created with the command (note
that the images were also scaled – view the html documentation or the pdf
documentation in a viewer that supports animation such as Adobe Reader to see the
animation.):
Accelerator keys