## Grid-zoom toolbar

Grid and snap steps are in mm, and can be set independently. The zoom factor is in percent: you can also type your own value, it will be recorded in the popup list for the current session. The button in the upper-left corner moves the scrollbars so that the point (0,0) lies at the center of the scrollpane (this is especially useful for large zoom factors).

## Toolkit panel

Note: draw-tools (ie greyed icons in the picture above) are explained in details in the Drawing Objects section.

| Select mode | Select and edit mode: see the Editing Objects section for further details. Important note: in every other mode/tool, including drawing-tools, a RIGHT-CLICK brings you back to this SELECT mode as soon as the editing process for the particular mode/tool has completed (eg for a drawing-tool, this means you have just really finished drawing an object).
| Zoom mode | Click to zoom in; shift-click to zoom out
| Edit Bezier points | This tool is mostly dedicated to adding/removing points to/from Bezier curves, polygons and smooth polygons, as well as to/from ellipses and parallelograms (by converting them to Bezier curves on-the-fly). Additionally, it allows you to alter the coefficients of smooth-polygon points. See the Editing Bezier points section for further details.
| Translate tool | Translates a selection by a given vector. Click to set the first vector point, then drag the second vector point to translate the whole selection.
| Scale tool | Scales a selection by a given scale factor. Press the left-button to set the invariant point, then drag the mouse to set the original (blue) rectangle, finally release and move the mouse to alter the scale factor (a red rectangle is displayed which allows you to monitor both x- and y- scaling coefficients).
| Rotate tool | Rotates a selection by a given angle. Press the left-button to set the invariant point, then drag the mouse to set the original vector (this will act as the reference for angle-measurement), finally release and move the mouse to alter the rotation angle.
| Global/local edit-point mode | Toggling this button on and off allows you to switch between GLOBAL (aka Scale- and Translate-tool, dual-in-one) vs LOCAL (single-point-editing) mode, either for single- or multiple-selection editing. In GLOBAL mode, the selection is highlighted as a single (red-stroked) rectangle, which allows you to move and rescale the entire selection content as a whole. In LOCAL mode, each element in the selection is highlighted instead, its end-points being displayed as green barbells; this allows you to edit each element separately without having to break the selection. Whenever a single element is selected, toggling between these two modes also proves useful: for Bezier curves, for instance, setting the mode to GLOBAL allows you to rescale the curve globally, whereas setting the mode to LOCAL enables control-points and tangents editing. Note, however, that you may as well want to stick to LOCAL mode and never use the GLOBAL mode, and use the Translate- and Scale-tools for altering a selection globally. This is rather a question of personal taste, since both approaches lead to the same result, though with a slightly distinct user-interface.

## Menus

Some of the following menu-items are also available as buttons in the main toolbar.

File menu
New | create a new drawing sheet.
Open | load an existing file from disk.
Reload | reload current drawing from disk
Save | save current file in LaTeX, epic or PSTricks format, depending on the current content-type; default directories can be specified in the preferences tabsheet.
Save As | let you choose another file name.
Save All | save all currently open sheets.
Save Selection As | let you save only selected (namely : highlighted) parts of your drawing ; useful to create fragments ; the user's fragment directory is automatically pre-selected in the file-chooser, but you can save fragments in other places...
Insert Fragment | insert a prerecorded fragment into the current active sheet (the topmost internal frame), placing it in the bottom-left corner of the frame ; by default, the filechooser points to the user's fragment directory, but you can obviously insert fragments from other places... See also the Fragment menu below.
Recent Files | this mutable menu keeps track of the last four loaded or updated files, and let you quickly load one of them.
Close | Close active frame
Exit | Save every open sheet to disk, then quit. |
Edit menu
Undo/Redo | undo/redo last change (the number of undoable steps is specified in the preferences menu).
Cut | cut current selection and send it to clipboard.
Copy | copy selection to clipboard.
Paste | paste selection from JPicEdt graphic clipboard, starting from bottom-left corner.
Paste special | paste selection by trying to parse the content of the system clipboard. For example, you may first copy a LaTeX string to the system clipboard from your favorite editor, then paste it to jPicEdit using PasteSpecial. This can obviously lead to a parser-error if the text content is not syntaxically correct. Under Linux, use `xclipboard` to copy a piece of text to the primary selection... Direct data transfer b/w the jEdit editor and jPicEdt works flawlessly however.
Select All | select every object in the current board.
Page format | set the page format of the current drawing board, if any. If there's no open board, set the default page format for new boards (this is identical as setting the page format from the Preferences).
Content type | set the content-type of the current drawing board, if any. This sets the formatter used to format the current drawing to LaTeX (i.e. LaTeX picture env, epic or PSTricks), and also affects the way elements are displayed (for example, colour is supported by PSTricks only, filling ellipses by PSTricks and eepic only,...).
Preferences | opens the "set preference" tab. See setting preferences.
Toolkit menu See drawing objects and editing objects for a detailed description of the tools available in this menu.
Command menu
LaTeX | run LaTeX on the current drawing; to sum up : jPicEdt creates a temporary LaTeX file on-the-fly, containing all the necessary stuff (see how to set the prolog and epilog in the preferences tabpane), in the temporary directory of the underlying platform (e.g. /tmp under Unix and MacOS-X, c:\windows\temp under Win9x,...) then run LaTeX on it. Contrary to previous releases, you don't need to save your picture anymore before running the LaTeX/DVI/etc... commands.
Dvi viewer | same thing, but run a dvi viewer on the same file (actually the one with a ".dvi" extension, which then assume you ran LaTeX before).
Dvips | run the referenced Dvips program.
Ghostview | run the referenced Ghostview program.
External program path and names (as well as their calling syntax) can be specified in the preferences.
Fragments menu
List of fragments | Depending on fragments found in the system-wide's and the user's fragments directory, you may see zero, one or more items here. Click to insert. User-saved fragments go into the "fragments" subdirectory of the user-settings directory (for instance : /home/user/.jpicedt/fragments on Unix).
Rescan | Rescan the list of fragments.
Script menu
BSH Console | Open a BSH Console for interacting on-the-fly with jpicedt, or for debugging your scripts.
List of scripts | Depending on scripts installed in the system-wide's and the user's script directory, you may see zero, one or more items here. Click to run.
Rescan | Rescan the list of installed scripts from the script directory.
Window menu
Cascade | cascade all internal windows.
Tile horizontal | tile windows horizontally, creating as new rows as necessary.
Tile vertical | tile windows vertically, creating as new columns as necessary.
Show/hide attributes panel | toggle the visibility of the floating "attribute editor". This can be useful on laptops, because this palette takes up a significant amount of the screen ;-).
Show/hide toolkit panel | toggle the visibility of the floating "toolkit panel".
The Window menu also maintains a list of currently open sheets so that you can quickly switch between them (Note : keyboard shortcuts may not work on Linux and MacOS platforms).