July 2008 - Chimera-users - RBVI Mailing Lists

Coloring different set of marker with different radius
by Bui Khanh Huy 08 Jul '08

08 Jul '08

Hi, I tried to color my EM electron density and thought that if I can color different maker sets with different radii, that would make thing much easierMy idea is to color one set using radius a, then select another set, color with radius b. But then the color from the first set disappeared. . Is there any way to do that? Best regards, Huy

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Mac Chimera in-window menu bars
by Thomas Goddard 07 Jul '08

07 Jul '08

Hi Kevin, The Chimera Aqua version has a menu bar at the top of the screen as normal Mac applications do and also at the top of the graphics window. I agree there should be a preference setting to eliminate the in-window menu bar. Here's the reason for this weirdness. There are 13 Chimera dialogs that have their own menu bars and menus. Use of these involves switching between actions in the main window and the dialog repeatedly. With menus for the active window only shown at the top of the screen this interaction becomes very tedious. For this reason I added menu bars within each Chimera window that has its own set of menus. Those in-window menus don't work very well. If you post one menu then put the pointer over an adjacent menu it will not pop up. An even worse atrocity in Aqua Chimera is that it implements "focus follows mouse". As the pointer is moved over the various Chimera windows the one underneath becomes active. This again was added because common Chimera usage involves switching frequently between windows and the normal Mac "click to focus" behavior is inconvenient for this. We would like instead to use "click through" where the first mouse click on a window both activates that window and presses the button or activates the entry field that was clicked on. I have not been able to do this in Aqua Tk, the windowing toolkit we use. The problem we're facing is that the Chimera user interface with its many windows and frequent switching between windows is poorly suited to the Mac GUI conventions. The in-window menus and focus-follows-mouse mode are a first stab at a compromise solution -- still much to be desired. Tom Kevin Walzer wrote: The latest build of Chimera from 7/3/08 on OS X/Aqua (10.5.4) includes menubars at the top of the screen (the standard OS X behavior) *and* on the main toplevel window itself, as on Windows and X11. This behavior is simply weird--two menus? It can only b e regarded as a bug, not a feature. What purpose does it serve? The correct Mac behavior can be restored by commenting out lines 1470-1476 of tkgui.py. If some of your Mac users are requesting this kind of behavior in menubars, at the very least the non- standard window-based menubar should be a preferences item that can be toggled off.

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Tile Structure default view
by Eduardo Sanz Garcia 07 Jul '08

07 Jul '08

I would like to request an extra feature for chimera, if it is not there already. I normally open multiple structures in chimera and then I use the "Tile Structure" button to visualize them in an array. This is nice, for example, to visualize the evolution of a cryo-EM 3D reconstruction. I would like that chimera could open multiple structures in an array view by default. Could a "Default view" button be added to the Tile Structure window, so that the "Border scale" value setting is saved and then the next time I open several structures they would be displayed in array view? Thank you very much.

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renumbering pdb
by bustik＠gmx.net 05 Jul '08

05 Jul '08

dear chimera-users, i am just starting to use chimera, so this will be a really simple question to you (although i didn't find anything about this in the manual...): is there a simple command to change residue numbers in a pdb file (i built up a homology model and want to elevate all residue numbers in the model the same amount)? thanks in advance sebastian -- Sebastian Kruggel Eppendorfer Weg 17d D 20259 Hamburg fon: +49 (0)40 4192 9579 mobil: +49 (0)151 1789 2232 e-mail: bustik(a)gmx.net

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graphics performance: amira v. chimera
by Matthew Dougherty 03 Jul '08

03 Jul '08

I loaded a MRC file, isosurfaced it, gave it a transparency around 0.48, and generated a vrml in chimera. I loaded the vrml into amira. initial comparison: I reloaded the vrml into chimera, I turned off the fog on chimera, moving the object around the refresh rate seems to be around 8 fps. On amira it seems to be around 24fps. results: The graphics on Chimera seems to be better during the rotation of transparent objects: full rotation in chimera is flawless, full rotation in amira results in flipping of the object (vertices in back quantum-ly jump to the front, front vertices go to back, looks like a z buffer error) periodically at 180 degrees, making it useless for many camera positions. Any comments or suggestions?

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OS X Chimera
by Christopher Vavricka 02 Jul '08

02 Jul '08

I have OS X 10.4.11 and I am trying to run Chimera. When I start Chimera.app it tells me to start X windowing system (Apple X server). X11 is not located in my applications/utlilties folder. How do I get this application? Is it on my installation disc for OS X? Regards, Chris Vavricka

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(no subject)
by Levy, Hazel C. 02 Jul '08

02 Jul '08

Hi, I am a postdoctoral researcher and an enthusiastic Chimera user. We are trying to finish up a manuscript to submit tomorrow to JSB and we have been frantically trying to figure out how to convert from Chimera's "contour level" to the more conventional "sigma level" for density map viewing at different noise levels. We understand that the higher the contour level the smaller the map volume displayed (less noisy), but we are not quit sure how to report this as a sigma level. Each map that we are comparing has a different contour range assigned, I am wondering if sigma level corresponds to some proportion of the maximum volume. Please let us know how to do this conversion or please point us in the direction toward the person that can help us. Thanks you so much...this information will settle a long-standing mystery for us. Hazel Levy

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Chimera-users July 2008