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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, one or more graphical windows are typically opened.
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Please note that on Windows, the GCDkit menu appears right of the menus
of the R system itself. On non-Windows systems, please type menuet() into the R command prompt in order to start
the menu system (GUI).
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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).
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More immediate response is obtained when print buffering
(Misc|BufferedOutput) is disabled.
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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 on your keyboard to scroll through the commands history in the Console), 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.
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This GCDkit was build in R version 3.6.0. 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!
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GCDkit requires the R packages base, stats, methods, utils,
graphics, MASS, grid, compiler, foreign, lattice and tcltk to be installed (which is normally the case).
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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.
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Note that recommended systems to run GCDkit are Windows
XP/Vista/7/8/10, even though the latter three are to be preferred. The platform-independent (i.e. non-Windows)
version of GCDkit is still experimental. Some of the features may not be available, others may work unpredictably.
Please use sensibly, at your own risk. For further information, see GCDkit blog.
- 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.
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PDF output should be given preference, as it is the most accurate
and it also supports semitransparency used in many diagrams. If no semitransparent colours are desired,
PostScript is a viable alternative. 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.
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If semitransparent colours are used, some printers simply ignore them
when printing directly from the plotting window. In these cases, use PDF export first and then print from
some other application, such as Adobe Reader.
Using 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.
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