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At the bottom of the Metview user interface is an area known as the icon drawers. This is a tabbed area where you can store icons which you will use often. Some sample drawers are supplied when you first start up Metview, but you can remove these and/or add your own. Have a look to confirm that the same set of icons is available in these drawers no matter which folder you are currently looking at in Metview.

To use the icons in the drawers, you can either:

• drag the icon from the drawer onto the desktop (a copy will be made)
• drag the icon from the drawer directly into the Display Window

Here are some suggestions of genuinely useful icons you can store here. In many cases, you will have already created such icons during other parts of the course, so you can just find them instead of creating them from scratch!

• in your current folder (not inside a drawer), create some Geographic View icons and set them up to view particular areas in your favourite projection. Drag and drop them into the My Views drawer (or create your own). Notice that the original icon remains in its folder - a copy of it has been made inside the drawer
• create some useful Contouring icons and drop them into the My Visdefs drawer (or create your own). Some suggestions:
  • shade from blue to red using 20 levels between the min and max of the data
  • plot grid points
• create some useful Symbol Plotting icons and drop them into the My Visdefs drawer (or create your own)
• create a Legend icon which plots a vertical legend down the right-hand side of the page and drop it into the My Visdefs drawer (or create your own)

Once you have some icons there, try plotting some data and using some of the icons in the drawers to enhance the plot.

Templates

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Templates are similar to the icon drawers, but work a little differently. Create a new Contouring icon and edit it. Open the Templates tab at the bottom of the editor. This is a place where you can store icons (specifically Contouring icons since this is the Contouring editor)

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. To see how they work, do the following:

• create another new Contouring icon with black isolines and call it Black Contours
• drop it into the Templates tab of the open icon editor
• close the icon editor, then re-open it to confirm that your dropped icon is still there; it is now available in the editor of any Contouring icon
• to add the parameters set in the template icon to the edited icon, drag the template icon into the main part of the editor
• to simply make the currently edited icon the same as the template,

Defaults

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