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In many ways, the Layout Editor is a like a simple page layout program. It can draw boxes and lines, type text and move the items around with a familiar interface. It has some additional aspects as well: it supports mulitple "pages" each with its own layout definition; it has controls to apply the same layout commands to many different datafiles; and it has the ability to reference live data in the workspace so that graphs are updated when the underlying gating hierarchy changes.
This window has a large number of controls, which are organized in groups. Below is an enlargement of the top right corner of the layout window, showing the groups of buttons in the window. Clicking on any of the buttons in the graphic below will scroll you to the section of this page that describes that group of controls.
The arrow is used to select existing objects. Click on an object to select it (as shown by dark handles at the corners of the object). Use the shift key to select additional items. Drag items to move them. Option-drag to duplicate them. Start a drag in the background of the layout editor, and it will draw out a rectangle. Upon finishing the drag, the layout editor will select all objects that are enclosed by that rectangle. The rectangle tool is used for drawing simple boxes and frames. If you create the rectangle surrounding another element, and want it to serve as a background, use the Send To Back command to change the order of the layout. Double click on the rectangle or use the Get Info command from the Layout menu to edit the properties of the rectangle. The line tool is used for drawing lines and arrows. Generally, you will want lines drawn on top of move other elements, so draw them last or use the Bring To Front command to change the order of the layout. Double click on the line or use the Get Info command from the Layout menu to edit its properties. Properties supported for lines include which side has an arrowhead, line weight, and dashing pattern. The text tool is used for adding textual annotation to the layout. To create a text box, you select the text tool from the tools, and click once or drag out a rectangle in the layout view. When you create a new text box, it will be active and accept keystrokes. Once you type the Enter key, or click the mouse on a different object in the layout, the editing stops, and the layout editor text is reformatted and frozen. In order to edit it again, you must double click on the text box to return it to the edit state. Text clippings or statistics from the workspace can dragged and dropped into a layout. In both of those cases, a text box is created automatically. Direct Output Commands Across the top of the layout window are three buttons, descibing the standard output functions of saving, copying and printing. The Save operation will create a Macintosh standard PICT file of the current layout at its current iteration value. The file is readable by virtually all graphics programs on the Macintosh, and most of the popular Windows editing packages.The Copy command puts the layout onto the Clipboard, and can be transferred to your favorite graphics package in memory. Note that certain settings of FlowJo can cause it to make a picture where every dot in a dot plot is a separate element in the picture. In particularly large files, this has been know to overtax other programs ability to paste the contents of the clipboard. If you are having troubles pasting pictures copied from FlowJo, you should go to the Preferences and turn off the setting "Export all graphs as high resolution PICTs".The Print button will cause the current version of the layout to be sent to your chosen printer. Print settings can be controlled either by the Page SetupÖ command in the File menu, or be the SetupÖ button in the lower left corner of the window. If you want to print the current layout from several different values or samples, you should use the Iteration controls to build a Frames Set, and print from that window. Iteration Controls Across the top right corner of the window, just under the Direct Output controls, is a row of controls used to change the sample or samples currently viewed in layout. It is easy to take a layout viewing one of your samples and its associated gates and statistics, and see the same displays applied to other data. Use of the iteration controls is discussed in context in Example 2.The largest and leftmost control is a pop-up menu containing all values of the current attribute that exist in the current group. If the current attribute is sample identifier, then all of the samples in the current group will be listed in the menu. If another keyword has been set to be the iteration attribute via the Iteration OptionsÖ dialog, then all values of that attribute will be listed. In a patient study, this may be a patient id, a date or therapy for which multiple samples have been drawn and collected.The button containing a stack of reports is the Iterate command button. It will cause a copy of the layout to be produced for each of the values of the iteration attribute (each sample, each patient, etc) in the active group. The stack of frames is then opened in a Frame Viewer window, which can display them either as a movie, or as a tiled set of frames that can be arranged for optimal printing or export. The rightmost control, the yellow up and down buttons, will reset the iteration attribute to its next or previous value. This is convenient for quickly looking through multiple layouts, without generating the entire set of them. Page Setup And Magnification
In the bottom left corner of the window are additional controls that govern the scaling of the layout, either (in the case of the Setup... button) on the printed page, or on the screen. The "SetupÖ" button will bring up the Mac's standard Page Setup dialog, allowing you to set options such as the Printer defaults, the paper size, the paper orientation and the scaling. You will notice that the layout editor draws light gray lines signifying where the page breaks would be if you were to print the layout. Changing the Page Setup options will generally cause the page breaks to be redrawn to reflect the new page size and scale.
This is different from the other settings, which govern how the layout is drawn onscreen within the editor. The smaller buttons showing distant and closer mountains reduce and increase the magnification within the layout window. The popup menu allows you to set the magnification directly. Scales from 12.5% to 200% of the original size are available. The Use Placeholders button is discussed later in its own page. |
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Use the layout editor to define a new layout definition. A layout definition is not the output data itself. Instead it is the specification of which graphs will be placed at what locations, when it is generated. You can have as many layout definitions in the workspace as you wish. You can create new empty definitions, duplicate existing ones, or delete them using the button in the top left corner of the window.