4.12 Preferences
In this dialog you can configure some general settings of Hollywood Designer
that are used for all projects that you open with Designer. The dialog is divided
into the following pages: General, Defaults, Memory, Palette, Thumbnails, File extensions, Hollywood,
Loaders, and Plugins.
a) General
This page allows you to configure the following options:
- ‘Always ask before copying files to the project directory’
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If you activate this option, Designer will show a confirmation dialog whenever it is
about to copy files into the project's directory.
- ‘Always ask before saving’
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If you activate this option, Designer will always ask
you to confirm that you really want to save the project. This is useful
if you often hit the "Save" button accidentally.
- ‘Always ask before deleting non-empty pages’
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If you activate this option, Designer
will always ask you to confirm the deletion of non-empty pages.
- ‘Always ask which language to load when opening multilingual projects’
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If you activate this option, Hollywood Designer will always ask you to choose the
language that you want to use when opening project that has more than one
language set.
- ‘Always ask before deleting object references’
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Activate this option if you want to be warned about object references when
deleting objects. For example, an object you are about to delete might be referenced
by an action event in another object. If you don't activate this option, you won't
be warned about such object references and they will be silently deleted.
- ‘Always ask before deleting page references’
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Activate this option if you want to be warned about page references when
deleting pages. For example, a page you are about to delete might be referenced
by an action event in another object or page. If you don't activate this option, you won't
be warned about such page references and they will be silently deleted.
- ‘Always ask before deleting group references’
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Activate this option if you want to be warned about group references when
deleting groups. For example, a group you are about to delete might be referenced
by an action event in another object. If you don't activate this option, you won't
be warned about such group references and they will be silently deleted.
- ‘Keep position when editing the source file of an object’
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When this is set and you change the source file of a brush, anim, or video object,
Hollywood Designer won't reset its position to the top-left corner any more.
- ‘Show progress bar when loading pages’
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By default Designer will show a progress bar when loading pages. On very fast computers
it might not make sense to show a progress bar when Designer loads a project page because it
will take only a fraction of a second. In that case, you might want to turn this option
off.
- ‘Grid and guides’
-
Here you can configure the color and style of grids and guides that can
be shown by selecting the corresponding menu item in the "Edit" menu. You
can also set the snap distance that should be used when "Snap to grid" and/or
"Snap to guides" is active.
b) Defaults
This page allows you to configure the following options:
- ‘Default page settings’
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Here you can enter a default size for new blank, pattern, and gradient pages.
Whenever you create such a page, Designer will use the dimensions specified
here as the default ones. You can also set the default color for blank pages
that are created using the "New blank page" tool in the left toolbar.
- ‘Default anchor point’
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The anchor point setting that you specify here will be
inherited by all new objects that you create. By default, this is set to
0.5/0.5 which means that the anchor point will be in the center of every
new object.
- ‘Create asynchronous action objects by default’
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Activate this option if new action objects should use asynchronous execution of their
action events by default. You can change this setting later in the properties dialog
for action objects. The option you set here is just the one that is initially assigned
to action objects when you create them.
c) Memory
This page allows you to configure the following options:
- ‘Available memory’
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You can use this setting to configure how much memory Designer should consume for the user interface.
If you have less than 64 MB of memory you should choose "low", if you have more than 64 MB but less than
192 MB choose "medium", otherwise choose "high". Note that even if you choose "medium" or "high", Designer
has some safeguards that will make it use low memory mode in case memory is getting low to prevent
running out of memory. When using low memory mode, Designer will use less images in its user interface to
save memory. In medium mode, Designer will use more images but it won't cache them in order to save memory.
- ‘Maximum number of undo levels’
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You can set this to the maximum number of operations Designer should keep in its undo/redo cache. Set
it to 0 for no limit. In that case, all operations will be cached but keep an eye on your available memory
if you don't use a maximum number of undo levels. Otherwise Designer could run out of memory if you
use it for several hours and all operations are cached.
- ‘Flush undo cache’
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Press this button to clear the undo cache. This can be useful if you'd like to free some memory.
d) Palette
This page allows you to configure the following options:
- ‘Keep color window open’
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If you select this option, Designer will not close the
color chooser window when you hit the "OK" button. This is useful if you
need to change the color of many different objects or if you have a very
large screen that has room for the color chooser window as well.
- ‘Copy color from active object’
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If you select this option, the color chooser will
always automatically receive the foreground color of the currently active
object.
- ‘User palette’
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Here you can define 48 personal colors that you use regularly.
You can then access these colors very easily by clicking the "Load user color"
button in the color chooser.
e) Thumbnails
This tab allows you to configure the settings of Hollywood Designer's
thumbnail viewer. You can specify the thumbnail size in pixels, as well as
whether or not anti-aliased scaling should be used.
f) File extensions
This tab allows you to set the file extensions Hollywood Designer should
use for the filter masks in its file requesters. There are four different
groups here: Image, Anim, Sound, and Video. The individual extensions must
be separated by vertical bar characters.
g) Hollywood
This page allows you to specify additional arguments that should be passed to
Hollywood when running or compiling a project. For example, if you want to use
the inbuilt resource monitor when running a script, you could add the option
"-resourcemonitor" here. It also allows you to change the path where Designer
should look for Hollywood and you can choose whether or not Hollywood should
show its startup screen when running your project.
h) Loaders
This page allows you to configure the loader priorities for animations, images, sounds
and videos. You can specify the order in which animation, image, sound, and video loaders
are queried to open the corresponding data files. Designer supports the loader types "Inbuilt"
(loaders provided by Designer itself), "Native" (loaders provided by the host OS, e.g. datatypes
on Amiga compatibles) and "Plugins" (loaders provided by plugins). By default, plugins are
asked first, then inbuilt loaders, then native ones but this order can be freely changed
in this tab by moving the individual loader types up or down.
i) Plugins
This tab allows you to choose plugins that should be disabled or that
should be required at start. Note that it is normally not necessary to
manually require plugins because plugins are automatically activated.
However, there are some exceptions: For example, the Polybios plugin is
not automatically activated because it needs lots of resources. Thus,
if you want to use Polybios, you need to explicitly select it here in the
"Require plugins" list to tell Hollywood Designer to load it at start.
Note that changes here will not take effect before you restart Hollywood
Designer.
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