Introducing The Main Window

When you start GPlates, the first window you will encounter is the Main Window. This contains your view of the globe, and is the starting-point of all tasks within GPlates. It is here that you can control your view of the globe, choose your reconstruction time, load and unload data, and interact with geological features.

The reconstruction view provides the user with a display of their data on the GPlates globe or map reconstructed to a moment in time. Control of the current reconstruction time, is located under the menu bar on the left, (see image below). The time can be controlled by both a text field, forwards and backwards time buttons, and the animation slider. In addition the shortcut Ctrl+T to enter a time value in the text field.

When the Drag Globe tool is activated the GPlates globe can be re-oriented freely using the mouse with a simple click and drag motion. If another tool is selected the globe can still be dragged by holding down Ctrl.

If the user wishes to adjust the camera position to a particular latitude and longitude, pressing Ctrl+Shift+L will pop up a window allowing manual entry of coordinates.

The amount of camera zoom can be controlled by the following:

The position of the camera and mouse pointer are provided along the bottom of the reconstruction view.

Each item in a menu is an operation. Related operations are grouped into menus, with the menu title indicating the common theme. For example, the View Menu in the image below contains operations which manipulate the user’s view of the globe. Within a menu, similar operations are grouped visually by horizontal lines or within sub-menus. In the View Menu below, the Camera Location, Camera Rotation, and Camera Zoom controls are grouped into their own sub-menus.

Some menu items use check boxes or tick marks to switch or choose operations. For example; Show Bottom Panel in the Window menu is activated by a small cross or tick that will be displayed next to the menu item when selected.

The Tool Palette is used to control your view and interaction with the GPlates globe and maps. You may recognise the concept of tools from graphics editing software (e.g. drawing tools in Photoshop ) or GIS software (e.g. ArcGIS mapping tools).

The Tool Palette includes camera positioning tools, feature selection tools and drawing tools. A tool is activated by clicking on it; only one tool can be active at any time. The task panel will reflect the current tool that is activated.

The availability of certain tools will change depending on what you currently have selected. For instance, the Modify Reconstruction Pole tool can only be used once a feature to be modified has been selected with the Choose Feature tool. All of the geometry-editing tools are context-sensitive, and can be used to operate on an existing feature or geometry that you are in the process of digitising.

The tools are also accessible via the Tools menu which also shows the shortcut key for each tool. The Tools menu also contains a check box Use Small Icons that reduces the size of the tool icons in the Tool Palette. This is useful if your screen resolution is low enough to force the bottom tools off the screen - this can happen if you are using a low-resolution screen projector.