Startup Preferences

What follows is true, and you can modify Geometer's startup preferences as described below, but the easier way to do it is now to use the Edit Preferences entry in the Edit pulldown menu. It will fire up a little user interface to set all the preferences below.

When Geometer starts, it tries to read a file called .geometerrc in your home directory (the directory in the environment variable HOME). If the HOME environment variable is not set, Geometer will look in the current directory. Currently, there are a few default values which can be set in that file -- the command to invoke the editor, and the size of the initial Geometer window.

Here is a sample version of .geometerrc that sets all: 

    size 800 700
    displayfont TIMES
    printcmd gsview32 /p %s
    printbw
    fontsize 18
    fontstyle BOLD
    rgbmode
    nonames
    browser netscape.exe
    edittextsize 12
    bigfont
This will start with a window for the geometry that's 800 pixels wide and 700 high in the second case. (Note that the width and height don't include the menu on the left (about 200 pixels) nor the pulldown on top (about 30 pixels). If you're using Geometer to make illustrations in Encapsulated PostScript, it's a good idea to have width and height equal, since the PostScript file only prints what's between -1 and 1 in both dimensions, and a square window will show exactly that. Geometer will attempt to run in RGB mode—use this if your computer has a fairly high-powered graphics card. If you're not sure what kind of graphics you have, try it and if it doesn't work, take the line out of your startup preferences file. The colors will be a little better in RGB mode. The nonames tells Geometer not to add names to points. This can be toggled on and off through the menu. bigfont tells geometer to use a larger text size in the menus and control panel

By default, Geometer uses Internet Explorer to look at the html help files. To change this, add a line like the final one to change the browser to be your favorite.

Similarly, the print command will stuff the print file names into the %s for the printcmd text.

The edittextsize sets the font size in the text editor. By default, it is 14 pixels.

Geometer can draw text on the screen in a few fonts, including: 

    HELVETICA (default)
    TIMES
    COURIER

These are available in: 

    PLAIN (default)
    BOLD
    ITALIC
    BOLDITALIC

If your printer can only print black and white, include the line printbw to get better printing.

The notips line tells Geometer that you do not want to see the "Tip of the day" when you start the program.