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4.3 File select dialogs

On most platforms you can drag files from your file manager directly to nip's main window. Alternatively, if you select Insert=>Image from file in the main window, nip will pop up a file dialog, see Figure 4.8. The file dialog has the following features:

Figure 4.8: nip's file dialog
\includegraphics[width=3.5in]{figs/scr12.PS}

Pin up button
Normally the file dialog closes after you have saved something. If this item is checked, the dialog will stay up instead -- this is useful if you want to load or save a series of images.

Increment button
If pin up and increment are both selected, then after a save nip will attempt to add one to the selected file name. For example, if you save a file called fred.v, after the save nip will put the name fred1.v into the selected file name box. Again, this is useful if you want to save a series of images.

Image type select
Use this menu to select the type of image you want nip to work with. There's a preference option to set the default format. The VIPS file format is fast and accurate, but sadly not very widely supported (joke). You can also load and save images in the popular TIFF, JPEG, PNG and PBM/PGM/PPM formats. The save options related to these formats can be changed in the JPEG save, TIFF save, PNG save and PBM/PGM/PPM save columns in the preferences workspace. You can load in many more formats, it depends how your nip has been configured.

Show thumbnails
Pressing this button pops up a window which shows thumbnail-sized images for all the matching files in the current directory.

Current directory line
You can type the name of a directory to move to in this box, or click on the down arrow to the right to pop down a list of directories you've previously been to. You can add directories you commonly use to this pulldown in the Data path section of the Preferences pane.

You can tab-complete in this box. Type the first character or two of the file or directory and press the Tab key. nip will change the display to show the directories which match that prefix. Double click on one of the matches to jump there, or type enough to match a single directory and press tab to jump to it.

Selected file name
You can tab-complete here too. If you specify a suffix, then that will override the file type option.

Files in current directory
All the files which match the currently selected file type (and tab-complete, if you're using that). You can select many files: when you click load, they'll all be loaded one after the other.


next up previous contents
Next: 4.4 Image processing window Up: 4. Reference Previous: 4.2 Regions, points, arrows   Contents
John Cupitt 2003-07-21