Paper Layout

Use the Paper region of the sidebar to specify the paper orientation, size and color. The Paper region of the sidebar has the follow controls:

Use the Frames region of the sidebar to customize the Header and Footer and the plot Frame Style in your paper layout.

To use your paper layout settings on other plots, save your settings to a file. This allows you to maintain different settings for different scenarios. Click the Load button in the Paper Layout sidebar to load paper layout settings. You have the option either to load an existing paper layout file (*.rslay, *.rslayx) or to load paper layout settings embedded in a project file (*.rspr). Refer to Projects for additional information about project files.

After making changes to the paper layout, if the paper layout file is already open, use the Save button to save your changes. Otherwise, use the Save As button to assign a file name and save the design. The file will have an extension of .rslayx. Toggle-on "Load at startup" before saving the file to have Tecplot RS load that layout every time it launches.

If you would like to associate your paper layout file with a set of XY and/or grid files, we recommend creating a project file. To create a project file, choose Save Project from the Project menu. Refer to Projects for additional information.

The Text Details dialog allows you to control the style of the text. For placeholder text for legends, the styles assigned to the text will be applied to the legend that appears in its place. Font, style, and color settings are used for legend labels, anchor and position settings control the legend placement, and text box options will control whether a box is drawn around the legend itself.

The Text Details dialog includes the following controls:

For legends, this should generally match the part of the frame where the anchor is positioned (for example, a corner); it will determine which direction the legend grows, and you will want the legend to grow toward the center of the frame.

You can embed Greek, Math, and User-defined characters into static text by enclosing the characters in text formatting tags. The text formatting tags and their effects include the following (format tags can appear in upper or lower case):

Embedded special characters display correctly only in texts of English font; they have no effect in text created in Greek, Math, or User-defined fonts.

To insert a tag into text literally, precede the first angle bracket with a backslash ("\"). To insert a backslash in the text, just type two backslashes ("\\"). In ASCII input files, the number of backslashes must be doubled (two to precede a special character, four to create a backslash) because the Preplot program also requires a backslash to escape special characters.

As described previously, you can produce subscripts or superscripts by enclosing any characters with _…​ or ^…​, respectively. Tecplot RS has only one level of superscripts and subscripts; expressions requiring additional levels, such as 'Equation Here', must be created by hand using multiple Tecplot RS text strings. If you alternate subscripts and superscripts, Tecplot RS positions the superscript directly above the subscript. Thus, the string a_b^c produces 'Equation Here'. To produce consecutive superscripts, enclose all superscript characters in a single pair of tags. The string x^(a+b) produces 'Equation Here' in your plot.

Tecplot RS supports the ISO-Latin1 character encodings. Characters in the ordinal range from 160-255 are now available, providing support for most of the major European languages. Custom Characters shows the characters supported by Tecplot RS. Note that the two right-hand columns represent the extended European characters. Text formatting tags for Greek, Math, or User-defined characters work only with characters in the range 32-126 and is not available for the extended European characters.

If your keyboard is configured to produce European characters, then the European characters should appear and print automatically with no additional setup.

If your keyboard is not configured to produce a specific European character you can generate it by including the sequence \nnn in your text where nnn is from the character index table found in Custom Characters. For example, if your keyboard will not generate the and you want to show the word "lattté" enter: latt\233

You can create symbols, characters, and even custom fonts for use in Tecplot RS.

The Paper Layout sidebar includes the most commonly used dynamic text items in the Dynamic Text region. This provides a simple shortcut for adding these items. The following items are categorized as Dynamic Text, meaning text that will change to reflect either what is currently being displayed or the state (date and time) when the plot was created.

The dynamic text options contain items that can duplicate each other. Understanding how each item works will prevent confusion.

RS_ENTITY and RS_VARIABLE will always label the entity and variable, respectively. In grid plots, RS_ENTITY will list the time stamp for time-dependent variables, and plane number for 2D Grid plots.

RS_FRAMETITLE will sometimes be the same as RS_ENTITY, and other times it will match RS_VARIABLE. The same is true for RS_PLOTTITLE, except it will use the alternate selection as the frame title.

Basically, RS_ENTITY and RS_VARIABLE are locked to always display exactly the text they are named for. RS_FRAMETITLE and RS_PLOTTITLE are "smart" options that adjust to reflect what makes the most sense according to the plot type.

This makes it easier to create a "generic" layout that can be used in all plot types, especially with multiple frames. For example, when you create XY Variables plots with multiple frames, each frame shows the same variables but a different entity. You might put the variable names in the header frame just once, but add the entity names to each frame. However, in the XY Entities plots, the entity name remains the same for all frames, and the variables change.

If you created layouts with RS_ENTITY and RS_VARIABLE dynamic text items, you would need to create a separate layout for each plot type. However, by using RS_PLOTTITLE for the label that goes in the header frame, and RS_FRAMETITLE for the heading that changes with each frame, you would leave it up to Tecplot RS to decide the most appropriate item to label in each.

The sample paper layouts included in your installation use the smart labels and are a great place to start.

One of the dynamic text items is the page number. A text field in the Paper Layout sidebar allows you to input or reset the starting page number. You can also reset this value in the Auto-Export dialog.

If you entered text in the Display As box on either the XY or Grid page of the Manage Data dialog, this text will appear in your paper layout (instead of the file name). Refer to Loading XY Data or Managing Grid Data, respectively, for additional information.

Tecplot RS gives you the ability to choose between displaying the short or long version of all variable (property) names. Click the Title Options button in the Paper Layout sidebar to specify when and whether to use long variable names in the following locations:

You can also choose whether to include the file extension when displaying RS_FILENAME in frames or legends.

When working with XY Freestyle Plots plots, the value of some of the dynamic text variables depends on the plot contents. Tecplot RS determines the variable values according to the following rules:

To add a polyline to your paper, first choose Polyline from the Insert menu to active the Polyline tool. To draw the polyline, click at the desired beginning point of the first line segment, move the pointer (without dragging) to the desired end point of the first line segment, and click again. Move the pointer to the next end point, click, and so on. After placing the last segment, double-click on the final end point, or right-click.

To draw a horizontal or vertical line segment, type the H or V keys, respectively, while drawing the segment. After you place the segment’s end point, the horizontal or vertical restriction ends. To lift the horizontal or vertical line segment restriction without placing the end point, type A on your keyboard. You can draw unconnected line segments in a single polyline; press U on your keyboard to "lift the pen." You can then move the pointer to the start of the next line segment. Refer to the following table for each key command.

To add a circle to your paper, choose Circle from the Insert menu. Then click at the desired center point of the circle, drag the pointer until the circle is the desired radius, and release.

To add an ellipse to your paper, choose Ellipse from the Insert menu, click at the desired center point of the ellipse, drag the pointer until the ellipse is the desired size and shape, and release.

To add a square to your paper, start by choosing Square from the Insert menu. Drag the pointer away from the anchor point of the square, which Tecplot RS chooses as either the lower left-hand corner or the upper right corner of the square. Drag to the right of the anchor to create a square with the anchor at lower left; drag the pointer to the left to create a square with the anchor at upper right. Release when the square is the desired size.

Use the Rectangle dialog to insert a rectangle into your plot workspace.

To add a rectangle to your paper, choose Rectangle from the Insert menu to activate the Rectangle tool. Then drag the pointer until the rectangle is the desired size and shape. In contrast to squares, rectangles can grow in any direction.

A 3D polyline may be used to display boundaries or structures in a 3D Grid plot. While it is not possible to create a 3D polyline geometry inside Tecplot RS, one can be imported using the Tecplot Data Loader (Project → Tecplot Data → Read Tecplot Text/Geometry File).

A 3D polyline file should only be imported after the 3D Grid plot is established. 3D polylines are transitory: they will be removed when the plot type is changed from 3D Grid.

The complete format of the Tecplot .dat Data File for 3D polylines is defined in the Tecplot 360 EX Data Format Guide. The key elements of this format required by Tecplot RS to import a 3D polyline are the following:

The following example provides additional information about the 3D polyline definition. It describes two offset polylines, one red and one blue.

Use the Geometry Details dialog to specify attributes of polylines, circles, ellipses, squares and rectangles. To access the Geometry Details dialog, double-click on the geometry object itself.

The following options are available:

The following fields are specific to particular geometry types: