-
After double clicking the icon GCDkit opens
“RConsole”, a text window serving for entry of commands as well as
display of textual output.
In addition, during the session are typically opened one or more graphical windows.
-
Please note that the GCDkit menu appears right of the menus of the R
system itself.
-
The interactions built in many plots (most commonly data point identification) can
be stopped from menu that appears after pressing the right mouse button. If experiencing problems, the
computation/plotting can be interrupted anytime by hitting Esc or from the menu (Misc|Stop current
computation).
-
More immediate response is obtained when print buffering
(Misc|BufferedOutput) is disabled.
-
The errors encountered while running the GCDkit system and displayed in the
Console are (mostly) not fatal. In majority of the cases it means that the
command can be re-run (one can simply press the up/down arrows in the Console to scroll
through the commands history), entering/modifying the parameters that
caused the crash. If the problem persists, record the details and send the data file to us, so we can fix the bug.
-
This GCDkit was build in R version 3.4.3. Due to
the quick developments in the R project, it is blocked in the previous versions, and the correct function in any future
version of R cannot be guaranteed!
-
GCDkit requires the R packages base, stats, methods, utils,
graphics, MASS, foreign, grid, tcltk and lattice to be installed (which is normally the case).
-
Strongly recommended are also packages RODBC enabling import and
export into the MS Excel, Access and dBase formats, R2HTML serving for output into HTML format, sp
for spatial analysis of the data and XML for reading/writing XML-formatted files. They are part of our Windows
distribution of GCDkit (i.e., that with the Windows installer) but if need be, they can be uploaded via the menu
Packages|Install package(s) from CRAN (online Internet connection required).
Offline installation is also possible: zip file downloaded from the CRAN site can be installed latter via menu
Packages|Install package(s) from local zipfiles.
-
Note that recommended systems to run GCDkit are Windows
XP/Vista/7/8/10, even though the latter three are to be preferred. Try to keep the number of opened graphical
windows to a necessary minimum, as the R may become instable, failing to redraw graphical windows if too many
of them are being open. It is always a good idea to close the unnecessary ones, for instance using the function
graphicsOff() or the corresponding item from the menu GCDkit.
-
PDF output should be given preference, as it is the most accurate
and it also supports semitransparency used in many diagrams.
A viable alternative is PostScript. Using WMF (Windows metafiles) or copying via clipboard are to be
discouraged, as the latter two methods lead sometimes to distortions of the graphs. For saving simply right-click
the graphical window and select the desired format.
-
The use of special symbols or accented characters (such as in some East
European languages) is mostly okay but it may also sometimes cause unexpected
problems. So please be sensible, especially in the variable names.