Adjusting CanoDraw diagrams
- You can further adjust created diagrams by selecting their components (symbols, labels, lines, arrows) and modifying them as described below. But in many cases, it is far better to change the default CanoDraw settings, so that the options are in place when a diagram is first created.
- To do so, use the Visual Attributes command in the View menu. A large dialog appears, where you must first select the graph object type in the list on left side and then you can change its default graphical attributes, as illustrated below for labels of response variable (species).
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| Visual Attributes Settings dialog |
- The settings you modify using the commands in the View menu are application wide and they are used by all the CanoDraw projects you create for various Canoco analyses. But there are also project-specific settings, which are concentrated into dialog invoked by the Settings command in the Project menu. In the Appearance page, illustrated in the snapshot below, you can select how the individual objects are labelled and whether and how diagram legend is created.
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| Project Settings dialog |
- To illustrate manipulation of already existing diagrams, we will change color of the species labels. They are black by default, but we will make them blue, because the species symbols are also blue. Click one of the species labels with the left mouse button. A red frame appears around the label. Position the mouse pointer in this frame and click the right mouse button. A context-sensitive popup menu appears, as illustrated below.
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| Context-sensitive popup menu |
- From the menu, select the Select Suchlike command. CanoDraw selects the remaining species labels, because they use the same font size and typeface as the currently selected one. If you want to select all labels in the diagram, irrespective of their appearance, you would need to use the Select Similar command.
- Now click the F5 key (or select the Properties Sheet command from the View menu), after which a dialog box with several pages appears:
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| The Properties Sheet |
- This is the centrepoint for adjustment of created CanoDraw graphs, allowing you to change the attributes of one or more selected objects. All the pages with attributes that make sense for the selected objects are enabled. For example, in our case, Color, Line, Fill, and Font pages are enabled, but the Symbol page is disabled because it makes no sense for labels. Select the Color page and there the blue button, as shown in the snapshot. Then click the Apply button.
- Note that you do not need to close this Properties sheet before changing your selection in the graph or switching to another CanoDraw diagram. You can simply shift the window aside and click somewhere within the CanoDraw window. You can click on the species symbols and select all of them by using the Select Suchlike command again. Click back on the Properties sheet and select the Symbol page, which is enabled this time. You can change the symbol type from Up-triangle to Star and increase the symbol size to 0.015, for example. Then click the Apply button.
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| Changing species symbols |
- In our diagram, many species labels overlap one another to some extent. We can readjust their positions so that they are more readable, but still mark the symbols correctly. To do so, first increase the magnification using the Zoom command, in the View menu. The magnification of 100 percent might be the best, but this depends on your screen resolution. You now probably see the upper left corner of the diagram, as illustrated on the snapshot below:
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| The magnified diagram with Ant odo selected |
- Select the Ant odo label by clicking its non-overlapping part ("odo" on my screen). Position the mouse button over the red frame, press the left mouse button, keep it pressed and drag the pointer to the right. You can see a "ghost" gray rectangle moving along, marking the new position of the Ant odo label if "dropped". Release the mouse button as soon as the label area does not overlap with the Vic lat symbol (or label).
- Sometimes it may be difficult to see, which symbol a particular label refers to. To help solving this difficulty, you can click the right mouse button over a selected label and use the Select labelled object command. To change the text of label, use the Change text command from the same popup menu.
- You can do many other adjustments to your ordination diagrams, print them, export them in several graphics formats, etc. Please, refer to the CanoDraw part of the Canoco for Windows reference manual. We end our demo here.
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