Look into renaming/reoganizing menus for easier use

[psavery]

Some of the menus may be named or reorganized better.

[donald-e-boyce]

Here are some thoughts on the menus.

The file menu has items open, save, import and export. First, I usually think that open goes with close, and load goes with save. So I would suggest renaming the open menu to load. But even then, there is not a lot of difference between load and import, or between save and export. I would think load/save refers to file formats used directly in hexrd, while import/export refers to formats outside hexrd. That seems to work for materials, configuration and state, all under the load/save menus.

For images, I think it's a little different. I see now that the open->Images menu item opens existing imageseries, while the import->Simple Image Series and import-> Image Stack both construct the imageseries used in hexrd. So it does fit the import menu. The problem is, I think, that first, users don't know the terms image series and image stack, nor do they understand what the native format for images is for hexrd. As the import/export menus mainly involve images, I suggest something like this:

• Load
  • Materials
  • Config
  • State
• Save
  • Materials
  • Config
  • State
• Images
  • Load Imageseries (or Load Saved Imageseries)
  • Build Simple Imageseries (or Load Image Files)
  • Build Multiwedge Imageseries
  • Save Imageseries
• LLNL Importer

Not sure where to put the To Maud item, which for me has always been grayed out.

[psavery]

Hi @donald-e-boyce. These are great suggestions!

Joel would frequently refer to the Open -> Images path as the "Image quick-loader". You can actually use it to open any kind of images, including TIFF files, HDF5 files, imageseries files, etc. It is similar to the Import -> Simple Imageseries, but skips showing the user the various options present in the Simple Image Series dialog (including aggregation, dark background subtraction, multiframe options, etc.). It is good if you just want to quickly open images and view them. You can even open multi-frame image series with it, although it has the unfortunate caveat that omegas do not get set if you do not use the "Simple Image Series" loader (so you wouldn't be able to run through the HEDM workflow if you opened your files with the quick loader). I think that there could be an argument made to add Load -> Images (for the image quickloader) and Save -> Images to that tree view above, although I need to think about it some more.

I think your arguments to use Load instead of Open make sense. The one main thing Open has going for it is that most applications seem to choose Open rather than Load, so it seems to be more conventional. But that doesn't necessarily mean that we have to do the same.

It might make sense to have a separate Images path for the images. Let's think about that some more.

Exporting to Maud is only enabled if you have images loaded and you are in the polar view (since the Maud format is based upon the polar view). It's potentially an option we can put somewhere else too (such as a button in the polar view settings).