Global Plot Settings: Plot Area Size

Make global changes to the various defaults used for the settings.

To open the Options window:

  • Windows: Select Tools → Options menu icon Options.
  • Mac: Select Thermo-Calc <version> → Preferences or Settings or press <⌘> on the keyboard.

On the Options window you can access the same settings either from the Graphical Mode or Console Mode tabs.

  • Click the Graphical Mode → Activities tabs and then click the Plotting node in the tree, or
  • Click the Console Mode → Plotting tabs.

The Console Mode and Graphical Mode plot settings are independent of each other once you start making changes to any predefined or custom Themes, or when applying changes to individual plots in either Mode.

For local or global application, the default settings applied in the Plot Area Size section are initially based on the selected predefined theme. Once a custom theme is available from the list, these default settings can also be related to how the custom theme is set up.

See Predefined Theme Settings for details and differences between the predefined themes initially available in the list.

In the Plot Area Size section, choose an option.

Click Fit the plot area size to the enclosing window and as the Visualizations window is resized, the plot moves and adjusts at the same time. This setting is the default for the Default, Large, and Small themes.

Click Fit the plot area size to a square with a width/height of the enclosing window. With this option, the minimum value of the width and height of the Visualizations window is used as the dimension of the fixed plot area and in a square.

Click Define the plot area size to enter a Plot area height and Plot area width (not applicable to triangular plots. The units are pixels and the size is kept as the size on the screen (96 dpi). This is the default for the Publication theme.

For the predefined themes this is already set for each as indicated below. As needed, you can change these defaults for one plot or create a new theme.

  • Default and Small are set to 400 x 400
  • Large is set to 700 x 700
  • Publication is set to 600 x 600

Click to deselect the Scale plot attributes using the system scaling factor checkbox to scale all plot attributes (i.e. labels, font size, axes, tick marks, etc.) independently of the screen size and resolution. This maintains consistent attribute sizing between different plots.

The minimum value of the width and height of the Visualizations window, or the fixed plot is used for resizing, in the following parts of the plot:

  • X- and Y-axis label
  • Legend font
  • Tick label font
  • Tick mark length
  • Title
  • Header
  • Line width
  • Data point width
  • Experiment data size
  • Logo