TECHNICAL NOTES*

  • 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.

  • DO NOT DELETE the file '.Rprofile' residing in the main GCDkit directory. Otherwise desktop shortcuts to run the GCDkit would stop working!

* This text applies fully to Windows (RGUI), but largely similar logic/behaviour is to be expected also to command-driven Windows (RTerm), Mac and Linux operation systems.