Figure 28: A window with 4 text panes
Text panes are grouped together into window frames. The user has the choice of 5 different configurations. The configurations are groupings of 1, 2, 4, 6, or 8 text panes connected together to form one single window. Figure 28 is an example of a 4 text pane configuration. These configurations are used to help the user organize the information that's being presented. If the user prefers to have a "messy" desktop, then he can use multiple one text pane window frames. Otherwise, the other configurations give the user different options for organizing their desktop.
The user also has the option of saving his/her entire desktop. Later, when KnEd is restarted, the system can be initialized to the state of the saved desktop. This lets the user shutdown at the end of the day and resume working with the same desktop state the next day.
Figure 29: The configuration menu storing output in postscript format
The KnEd system has full postscript print capability. The entire text frame window, a single text pane, or a single tree pane can be printed to a file using postscript. The file can then be printed on a LaserWriter or can be included in documents, such as LaTeX documents. Figure 29 shows the standard print menu.
Some of the options on the print menu are:
• Postscript Output Path the file to save the postscript drawing to.
• Image Destination the destination of the postscript drawing.
- laser-printing it will be sent to a laser printer
- document-inclusion it will be included in a document, such as LaTeX
• Image Orientation the orientation of the drawing when it's printed.
- portrait no change to coordinates
- landscape drawing is rotated 90 degrees
• Number of Output Pages whether to display the drawing across multiple pages or not.
- one the drawing will be scaled so that it all fits on one page
- multiple the drawing will be divided up with each part being drawn on a separate page (this option only works when the destination is laser-printing)
• Display date on plot display the current date on the plot.
- t displays the date
- nil the date's not displayed
A major problem faced by the knowledge engineer is the need to have multiple people editing the knowledge base at the same time. With the use of X-Windows, an elegant solution was achieved.
A knowledge engineer starts up a multi-user version of KnEd. The engineer then adds users by giving a username and the name of their display terminal. The display of the user is setup using the users desktop configuration. The user then works as if he/she was using the single-user mode of KnEd. There is one exception to this. Locks were added to KM to guarantee that operations performed on the multi-user knowledge base are atomic. Also, if the user encounters a system error during editing, an error message is displayed in a popup window. If this window didn't exist, then the user would have to go to the display where the system was originally started to check for error messages.