Preferences and Initialization File

Configuration settings which pertain to running the Enif program as such (i.e. not related to the configuration of plots or lists) are handled by a configurable object we refer to as the preferences. The preferences consist of a set of parameters which are divided into the following groups:

• General parameters containing information about the default data bank, the default startup plot configuration or the diagnostic log file.
• Layout parameters which define the screen appearance of the Enif program.
• Font parameters which allow the customization of the fonts used by Enif.
• Stylus parameters containing the system defined styli and an open set of user defined styli.
• Network caching parameters which are used to determine which network attributes are put into the network element's data buffers and which are read ``on-the-fly'' from the EMME/2 data bank when needed.
• Plot related parameters controlling the features of the network plane (e.g. magnifier size and factor) and defining whether the network uses right hand or left hand traffic.
• Print parameters are used to setup the printing characteristics used for plots and lists.
• Predefined views allow the user to store and recall network windows to easily access a certain part of the network plane by a logical name.
• Registered plot and list configurations are used to define which plot and list configurations can be accessed directly from Enif's ``Plot'' and ``List'' menus.

All system defined parameters are organized in a single parameter list. Separate parameter lists are used to contain each of the following types of user defined parameters: predefined views, registered plot configurations, registered list configurations and user defined styli. This allows each parameter type to have its own name space, so that no conflict occurs if e.g. a predefined view uses the same name as a registered list.

The values of all preference parameters can be saved to an initialization file, so that they can be used as starting values for subsequent Enif sessions. By default the initialization file enif.ini is used, but it is also possible to specify an alternate initialization file on the Enif command line using the -i option.