SuperEdit ’s Magnifying Glass tool provides quick and transparent access to a detailed view of the raster image in the neighborhood of the current cursor position. Magnifying Glass is an important support tool for snap to raster functions, as described in the next section of this manual. It is, however, very useful also independently from snapping and may be used for quick viewing of image details and precise manual positioning of the cursor on the raster image while executing SuperEdit commands.

Click the Open button on the Main toolbar, for File Type choose TIFF , and open the office.tif drawing in the DOC subdirectory. Choose the Options - Configuration option and select the Magnifying Glass tab. Check the Magnifying Glass active and Pop up on hot key pressed options - this will let you pop up Magnifying Glass by clicking Ctrl+Q . Default values for Size ( 100 pixels) and Magnification ( 3 times) should do fine for most images, but of course, you may change them as needed. Sometime it may be wise to change the Magnifying glass hot key to something else then Ctrl+Q , say F12.

Choose Document - Add New Vector option to add empty vector.tvd drawing and to enable the Vector toolbar. Use Polygon button to draw an outline of the scanned floor drawing, or to connect any specific points of it. This practically forces you to use Zoom Window and Zoom Extents commands repeatedly, which is certainly not convenient.

Now repeat the same exercise using Magnifying Glass . Click the Zoom Extents button on the Main toolbar to show the entire document. Click the Polygon button on the Vector toolbar and place the cursor near the intended position on the raster image. Hit the Ctrl+Q key ( Magnifying glass hot key) . The Magnifying Glass pops up showing an enlarged neighborhood of the cursor position, and a cross cursor that you may use to define a point within the Magnifying Glass window.

Place the cross cursor precisely on the enlarged raster image and click the left mouse button to define a point. The Polygon command receives the point’s coordinates, the Magnifying Glass window disappears, and you may proceed to define next point. Please notice that you may close the Magnifying Glass window without defining a point simply by moving the mouse cursor outside of it.

Magnifying Glass is equally usable while defining those SuperEdit commands that require precise graphical input. Zoom Window to show the lower half of the office.tif image. Click the Clear button on the Raster toolbar. Try to clear interiors of rooms located next to the stairs. It is much easier to define rectangle or polygon corners when you hit Ctrl+Q and define each point through Magnifying Glass .

If you want to remove Magnifying Glass from the screen, simply move the cursor away from it and it disappears. However, if the Keep on display option on the Magnifying Glass tab in the Configuration dialog is checked, you must accept each point entered using right mouse button click or press Esc to close Magnifying Glass without defining a point.

When you need to have a better control over the exact position of points that are being entered through Magnifying Glass , check the Keep on display option on the Magnifying glass tab of the SuperEdit ’s Configuration dialog. This will make the Magnifying Glass pop up window wait on the screen until you click the right button to accept the entered point position. Press Esc to close Magnifying Glass without defining a point.