Chapter 3. Getting Started

This chapter introduces various basic concepts and terms, such as masks or selections, explains the organization of data in Gwyddion and describes the user interface.

The descriptions are relatively thorough and some of the topics near the end of the chapter, such as raw file import, might be considered advanced and not for everyday use. So, despite the name, it is not necessary to read this entire chapter to be able to work with Gwyddion. The Gwyddion user interface is intuitive and much can be discovered by playing. The clarification of the basic ideas and components provided here will hopefully ease the discovering.

You can also get help for the current function or window from within Gwyddion. Pressing F1 or clicking on the Help button will in most windows show a relevant part of the on-line version of this guide in a web browser. The starting page of guide can be displayed by Info → User Guide. Of course, this works if you are on-line and Gwyddion finds a suitable web browser. See the settings tweaks if you want or need to tweak the setup, e.g. for an off-line version of the guide.