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Brief Guide of How To Use the Southbeach Modeller (in the Editor Mode) |
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Posted: Apr. 2, 2014 |
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Editor's Note (Toru Nakagawa, Mar. 24, 2014)
Last year on June 9, I posted in Japanese this Brief Guide of How to Use the Southbeach Modeller. And today I am posting it in English translation.
The Southbeach Modeller is a very sophisticated and excellently designed software tool. It has so many functions, features, and options, and yet is shown on the window in a very compact way. It has a rich library of white papers, specifications, demo videos, sample outputs, and examples made by developers and users. The usage of the software is mostly intuitive. Every aspect is so nice that we could not expect more than the present in an ordinary standard.
However, its users meet some difficulty for starting up. This means that every user meets the difficulty at the beginning, until he/she finds the basic way of operation and learns the basic design philosophy. A lack of Users Manuals may be the weak point. I think NOT a Reference Manual but a brief & easy Guide is needed for the beginners of the Southbeach Modeller.
Thus I wrote this Guide a year ago, for assisting the beginners to get started in using the Southbeach Modeller in the Editor Mode (i.e., for building the models). I wish many users help us extend this further.
Brief Guide of How To Use the Southbeach Modeller (in the Editor Mode)
Toru Nakagawa (Osaka Gakuin University), Mar. 24, 2014
(1) First we should better write the Boxes (or Agents in SB) one after another.
In the Palette of Toolbox (located at bottom-left), there are Boxes for Useful (green), for Harmful (red), for neutral (gray), etc.
Drag-and-dropping one of them at the model zone (in the center) may be the easiest way to draw a Box.When you drop the Box, you are immediately requested to write its contents (i.e., name, keywords, sentence, etc.).
You may write in Japanese (or in English) as usual (or in any other language).
To fold the contents at suitable places in a box for better readability, you may press 'Ctrl+Return'.Properties of a Box (e.g., Useful/Harmful, Highlighted, Insufficient, etc.) may be modified/readjusted afterwards by right-clicking the Box and clicking suitable properties (or opening the Properties dialog box).
Position and size of a Box can be easily adjusted in a usual way.
For moving a Box, hold (by clicking) the central part (or more exactly, the text part) of the Box and drag it.
Otherwise, select the Box (i.e., at the state when the corners and the middle points of the edges are shown) and press the arrow keys of the keyboard continuously, to move the Box in any direction (up/down and right/left).(2) Then, draw Arrows between the Boxes to show the relationships (e.g., effects).
There are NO Arrows in the Toolbox.
The SB Modeller does not have the sense of drawing Arrows by drag-and-drop of Arrow symbols.
It urges us to pick up one Box and another and then to specify the relationship between the two.In order to draw such a link (or an arrow), you should NOT try to select an 'edge' of a Box and make a link to an 'edge' of another Box.
You should select an internal part of a Box (or more precisely, the part out of the text box and inside the Box) and make a link to an internal part of another Box.
Then the Modeller draw an arrow from some proper position on an edge of the first Box to some suitable position on an edge of the second Box.Such an arrow is connected to the Boxes, and when either of the Boxes is moved the arrow follows without disconnecting the link.
The basic nature of the relationship (e.g., Useful/Harmful) is automatically speculated with the natures of the connected Boxes.
For specifying the properties of the relationship more closely, you may right-click the link and click suitable properties (or click the 'Properties' to open the Properties dialog box). (You may specify Counteract, Insufficient, Possible, etc. in such a manner.)(3) You can readjust your model in various ways after making a part (or whole) of the model.
Selecting a Box or a group of Boxes, you may move them slightly or distantly.
The Arrows follow the Boxes without disconnection.You may select a part (or whole) of the model, copy it, paste it at some other place, and use it for modifications.
The thickness of Box edges, the thickness of links, etc. of the whole model can be modified at a time.
(These properties may also be specified at the beginning of the model drawing. The default value of Box sizes may be specified at first.)Font sizes may also be changed (for a selected group of Boxes) at a time.
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Last updated on Apr. 2, 2014. Access point: Editor: nakagawa@ogu.ac.jp