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#### A.4.11.2 Cube Axes Control

The Axes control () for the cube plot window has the following tabs:

Coords Tab

Coords tab of the cube Axes control

The Coords tab controls the axis coordinates. It has the following options:

Isometric
  If selected, the scaling will be the same on the X, Y and Z axes, so that positions will retain their natural position in 3-d Cartesian space. When unselected, the three axes will be scaled independently, so that the positions may be squashed in some directions. This option is ignored if there is a mix of linear and logarithmic axes.
X/Y/Z Scale
  Selects scaling (linear, log, asinh, symlog) for the X/Y/Z axes. See Appendix A.4.2.4.
X/Y/Z Flip
  If selected, X/Y/Z axis coordinate axes run in the opposite direction to normal.

Navigation Tab

Navigation tab of the cube Axes control

The Navigation tab controls details of how the navigation works. It has the following options:

Zoom Axes
  By default the Auto setting is in effect. This means that the mouse wheel zooms around the center of the cube, and right-button drag zooms in the two dimensions most closely aligned with the plane of the screen, with the reference position set by the initial position of the mouse. If Auto is unset, then all zoom operations are around the cube center, and affect the axes indicated by the X/Y/Z checkboxes.
Zoom Factor
  Controls the factor by which each zoom action zooms the plot. Moving this slider to the left/right makes the mouse more/less sensitive (one wheel click or dragging a fixed distance has more/less zoom effect).

Range Tab

Range tab of the cube Axes control

The Range tab provides manual configuration of the visible range of the plot. Making changes to this tab will reset the visible plot range, but not vice versa - zooming and panning in the usual way will not change the settings of this panel.

Filling in the Minimum/Maximum fields for one or more axes will constrain the corresponding range of the visible data. The limits corresponding to any of those fields that are left blank will initially be worked out from the data. The Subrange double-sliders restrict the ranges within the (explicit or automatic) min/max ranges. Note you can move both sliders at once by grabbing a position between the two.

The Clear button resets all the fields.

View Tab

View tab of the cube Axes control

The View tab can configure how the cube containing the data is viewed in the plot window, though it does not control the content of the cube.

Zoom factor
  Sets the magnification of the cube wireframe itself, without affecting the data volume it contains. This cannot be done with the mouse.
X/Y offset of centre
  Controls where on the screen the cube wireframe is centred. This cannot be done with the mouse.

Grid Tab

Grid tab of the cube Axes control

The Grid tab configures the appearance of the cube wire frame enclosing the data volume.

Draw wire frame
  Whether the enclosing cube is drawn at all.
Minor Ticks
  If set, minor (unlabelled) tick marks will be drawn between the major (labelled) ones.
X/Y/Z Tick Crowding
  Use the slider to influence how many tick marks are draw on each axis.
Tick Label Angles
  Controls orientation of numeric labels on the axes. By default they are drawn adaptively: horizontally where possible, but may be angled to accommodate more labels if crowding is high. But you can choose to fix the orientation horizontal or angled instead.
Antialiasing
  Controls whether grid lines will be drawn antialiased (smoothed) or not. This option does not affect exported plots.

Labels Tab

Labels tab of the cube Axes control

The Labels tab controls the text labels on the axes. If the Auto checkbox is set, the text will be taken from one of the data coordinates being plotted on that axis. To override those with your own axis labels, unset Auto and type text in to the Label fields.

Font Tab

Font tab

The Font tab configures the font used for axis annotation. It also affects some other things like the legend.

Text Syntax
  How to turn the text into characters on the screen. Plain and Antialias both take the text at face value, but Antialias smooths the characters. Antialiased text usually looks nicer, but can be perceptibly slower to plot. At time of writing, on MacOS antialiased text seems to be required to stop the writing coming out upside-down for non-horizontal text. LaTeX interprets the text as LaTeX source code and typesets it accordingly.
Font Size
  Size of the font in points.
Font Style
  Style of the font.
Font Weight
  Whether the font is plain, bold or italic.

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TOPCAT - Tool for OPerations on Catalogues And Tables
Starlink User Note253
TOPCAT web page: http://www.starlink.ac.uk/topcat/
Author email: m.b.taylor@bristol.ac.uk
Mailing list: topcat-user@jiscmail.ac.uk