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General Concepts
There are two versions of Ipe, distinguishable
by the letters "X" or "GL" in the startup message. The X version
is a pure X client and should run on any system supporting the
X window system. The GL version, on the other hand, implements
the canvas as a GL area within the X application, and is therefore
available only on machines running the GL graphics library, in
particular Silicon Graphics workstations. The advantage of the
GL version is that it can exploit additional graphics hardware
of such machines such as the overlay or popup planes. The X version of
Ipe has to simulate these overlay planes using the colormap, and
this reduces the number of colors that Ipe still can display. The
GL version can show more colors, and can display nicer bitmaps
than the X version. But neglecting a few differences in the display,
the two Ipe variants behave the same.
Whichever Ipe version you are using, after you start up Ipe, you
will see a window with a large light yellow area.
This area, the canvas, is the drawing area where you will create
your figures. In the lower left corner you find nine buttons to select
the nine different object types that you can create in Ipe, namely
polylines, polygons, splines, splinegons, text objects, circles and
ellipses, rectangles and squares, marks, and circular arcs. The rest
of the left hand margin is used by fields that control attributes of
Ipe objects (color, line width, arrows), a field showing the zoom
factor, and a field that contains all buttons for the different
snapping modes. On the top of Ipe's window you have the menu bar,
and in the top right corner the mouse explainer, which tells you at any
time what the function of the three mouse buttons is. (This concept
has been borrowed from the xfig
drawing editor.) The display
area above the canvas shows the current file name, the current page
number, the name of the last operation and its keyboard shortcut.
Here is a summary of the function of the mouse buttons when pressed
inside the canvas.
Left Mouse Middle Mouse Right Mouse
Plain (start drawing) move select
Shift scale pan select more
Ctrl stretch rotate select type
Shift+Ctrl select more type
The precise meaning of all these functions will be discussed later. As a
rule of thumb, you might want to remember that the Shift key
usually makes a mouse button less destructive than without or with the
control key: scale is nicer to objects than stretch,
pan is "softer" than move or rotate.
Finally, whenever the right mouse button is used to select objects, the
Shift key makes it non-destructive, and the Ctrl key
restricts its function to objects of the current object type.
In this chapter we will discuss the general concepts of Ipe.
Understanding these properly will be essential if you want to get the
most out of Ipe.