ParaView/Users Guide/Settings

Application Settings

Application wide settings are saved in between sessions so that every time you start ParaView on the same machine you get the same behaviors. The settings are stored in an XML file that resides at %APPDATA%\ParaView\ParaViewVERSION.ini on Windows and ~/.config/ParaView/ParaViewVERSION.ini on all other platforms. If you need to restore ParaView's default settings you can either move this file or run with the --disable-registry argument.

These settings are managed via the settings dialog. On Macintosh this is reached from the Preferences entry in the ParaView menu. On Unix, Linux and Windows systems it is reached from the Settings entry on the Edit menu. These settings are program wide and are not to be confused with the View settings found under the Edit menu. Those settings are specific to each View window and are discussed in the Displaying Data chapter.

The following figures show the various pages within the settings dialog. Choose from among them by clicking on the page list toward the left. Click on the arrow to expose the three sub pages in the Render View settings category. Some plugins add their own pages to the dialog but we do not discuss them here and instead refer you to any documentation that comes along with the plugin. Do note though that most settings are documented within the application via tooltips.

General

Figure 1. General Preferences

• Default View : choose the View window type that ParaView initially shows when it starts up and connects to any server.
• On File Open : Control the timestep shown by default when ParaView opens a file with multiple time steps.
• Rescale Data Range Mode : Controls how color lookup tables are adjusted when data ranges change
• Heart-Beat Interval : Sets the length of time between keepalive messages that the client sends to the remote server which prevents the TCP connection between the two machines from shutting down.
• Auto Accept : Makes every change take effect immediately rather than requiring you to click the Apply button.
• Auto Convert Properties : Tells ParaView to do some data conversions automatically so that more filters are immediately applicable to the data you have at hand.
• Crash Recovery : Tells ParaView to save a record of each action you take so that you can easily recover your work if ParaView crashes mid-session.
• Use Multi-Core : Tells ParaView to spawn an MPI parallel server on the same machine that is running the GUI so as to better take advantage of multi-core machines on processing bound problems.

Colors

Figure 2. Color Preferences

Animation

Figure 3. Animation Preferences

• Cache Geometry : When checked this allows ParaView to save and later reuse rather than regenerate visible geometry during animation play back to speed up replay.

• Cache Limit : This is the maximum size of the animation playback geometry cache (on each node when in parallel).

Charts

Figure 4. Chart Preferences

Render View General

'Figure 5. General Render View Preferences

Render View Camera

Figure 6. Camera Preferences

Render View Server

Figure 7. Server Preferences