This tutorial has been designed to provide the user with an introduction to the user interface. The other tutorials assume that this material has been covered.
FRED’s Document View Architecture The FRED’s graphical user interface (GUI) is very similar to most Windows programs but it has been tailored to the needs of optical design and analysis. A FRED document can be considered as a stand alone optical system consisting of at least one or more of the following object types:
The FRED user interface provides two views of a FRED document/system: •The object tree view •The visualization view
The system tree view provides a hierarchal organization of the FRED document with a node for each of the seven object types listed above. A node in the system tree view consists of an icon, title, and description.
When an object is entered into a FRED document, it is listed under the appropriate node. A node with objects can be expanded to show the objects or collapsed to hide the objects. A collapsed node has a "+" symbol in front of the node and an expanded node has a "-" symbol in front of the node. To expand or collapse a node either single left mouse click on the "+" or "-" symbols respectively.
Menus, Toolbars, and the Object Tree view All of the commands in FRED are available through a left mouse button click on the appropriate menu item,
a left mouse click on the appropriate toolbar item,
or a right mouse click on the appropriate node in the system tree view.
Generally, if you want to perform an action with the information in a FRED document, you do so with a menu item or toolbar item. If you want to add or change an object in the FRED document, then right click on the appropriate node of the system tree and make a selection in the pop-up menu.
The Output Window and the Command Line The results of actions taken with the information in a FRED document are listed in the output window. For example, if a raytrace is performed then the results of the raytrace are listed in the output window. In addition, the coordinates of the cursor in the visualization window are shown below the output window and command line.
The output window is actually a spreadsheet. The view of the output window toggled between a plain text format and a spreadsheet format in the View menu (View > Output Window > Cells).
The spreadsheet format is similar to an Excel™ spreadsheet format.
Commands can be typed in manually on the command line. Presently, there are very few typed commands available in FRED. And you can change the color of text, numbers, and formulae in the output window in the format page of the preferences dialog (Tools > Preferences > Format). This format page handles both the output window and the macro editor so you need to select the output window as the category before you can change the output window colors.
Most objects in FRED including geometry objects, materials, coatings, and optical sources can be copied and pasted using the copy command,
A quicker alternative to copy and paste is drag and drop. FRED geometry objects, materials, coatings, and sources can all be dragged and dropped to make copies. To make copies with drag and drop, simply left mouse click on the object to be copied and while pressing Ctrl key and holding the left mouse button down drag the object to the another node in the same section of system tree and release mouse key and then the Ctrl key. When you press the Ctrl key, you will get a “+” next to the cursor.
To move an object with drag and drop, left mouse click on the object to be moved and drag the object to another location in the same section of the system tree.
In the case of materials and coatings, they can be dragged and dropped on to geometry objects to apply them to geometry objects. You do not need to hold down keys to apply a material or coating using the drag and drop method.
Visualization Window Controls The visualization window can be zoomed, translated, rotated, etc. using the visualization window toolbar controls.
The trackball option,
The Traceable Toggle Switch If you want something to be visible in the visualization window (and ray traced), then the object must have the Traceable toggle switch turned on. This option is available in the right mouse click pop-up menu.
Visualizing Bounding Boxes When you left mouse click on a geometry or source object in the FRED tree view, then the bounding box around that object is traced out in RED.
Color, Transparency, and Improving the rendering with Tessellation. The color, transparency, and surface drawing mode of an individual surface can be changed in the visualization page of the surface edit dialog. To display this dialog page, right mouse click on the surface you would like to edit and choose "Edit/View Surface...".
From there, click on the Visualization tab.
There are times when the rendering of an object is poor or non-existent because the object is fairly small compared to the Outer Trimming Volume. If an object is not rendering in the visualization window (and it is set as Traceable) then reducing the tessellation in the visualization page of the surface edit dialog will likely fix the problem (see the right hand side of the Visualization page).
The color, transparency, and surface drawing mode can be changed for all the objects with the Color Attributes dialog available in the pop-up menu from a right mouse click on any geometry node.
FRED will allow multiple independent documents to be open at the same time. This makes it easy to compare and contrast systems. It should be noted that the objects and system raytrace information in any given open FRED document is independent of the other open FRED documents.
Both the drag and drop option and the copy and paste option can be done inside of one document or between multiple documents. If you apply a material or coating from one document to another document via a drag and drop, the material or coating is automatically added to the materials or coating node respectively and will be available inside the destination document for future use.
The GUI interface is discussed in more detail in the user interface section of the help files.
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