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The Freeze Display Button: Suppress Redisplay

When pressed, no cell structure is drawn in the window, only the grid and the cell bounding box. This is for use when working on a large, complex design when it is not necessary to see the structure and it is inconvenient to wait for the display. When active, ``FROZEN'' appears in the upper left corner of the window.

In a frozen window, certain other highlighting features may appear. In particular rulers and the viewport location indicators as used by the Show Location function will be displayed. Also, the outlines of selected objects will appear in these windows.

Frozen subwindows have an additional feature: frozen subwindows display the viewport of the main window, the reverse of the Show Location function for subwindows (which displays subwindow viewports in the main window).

This allows a useful trick for viewing huge cells. Suppose that one has a large design which takes a long time to render, and one wishes to examine a small part of this design (the approximate coordinates are known). One can employ to following procedure. Freeze the main window and read in the design. Bring up a subwindow by clicking twice outside of the cell boundary, so that the subwindow is empty. Freeze the subwindow, then press the Home key with the cursor in the subwindow to center and fully view the top cell boundary. Use the grid and/or rulers to determine the region of interest. Drag with button 3 to define a rectangle in the subwindow surrounding the region of interest, then click with button 3 in the center of the main window. Un-freeze the main window, and this region will be displayed. The region shown in the main window is shown with a dotted yellow outline in the frozen subwindow.


next up previous contents index
Next: The Constrain 45 Button: Up: The Attributes Menu: Set Previous: Macro File Format   Contents   Index
Stephen R. Whiteley 2006-10-23