Build Figures

Figures is where the work becomes a picture: a publication-ready multi-panel layout for a paper, a poster, or a lab meeting. Panels are filled from your own images, your analysis results, and your data tables, so a figure stays connected to the data behind it instead of becoming a folder of exported PNGs.

Creating a Figure

New figure asks for a name and whether it's private or shared before it creates anything, so a blank "Untitled Figure" never shows up in search or in your recent items. It opens with two panels side by side, which you'll change immediately.

Layout

A figure is a canvas of rectangles, not a fixed grid. Each panel has a position and a size, and can be any shape you want.

Layout in the sidebar opens Choose layout, with 23 arrangements grouped by how many panels they hold, from a single panel up to nine. They have names that describe them, such as Two stacked, Wide top + 2, Large left + 2, and 3 / 3 / 2.

A preset is a starting point rather than a mode you're then locked into. Once panels exist you shape the figure directly:

• Split into columns and Split into rows on a panel's toolbar divide it in two
• Drag the gutter between panels to change their relative sizes
• Move repositions a panel

A panel's actions live on a toolbar along its bottom edge, which appears when you move the pointer over the panel. A touch screen has no pointer, so on a tablet or a phone the same actions sit in the ⋯ menu in the panel's top right corner, clear of the picture underneath.

Reset in the layout dialog box re-tiles everything evenly. It asks first, because a hand-tuned layout can't be recovered afterwards.

Canvas Shape

Shape, next to Layout, sets what the whole figure is for:

Exports capture at this aspect ratio, so choosing it up front saves reworking the layout later.

Filling a Panel

Add on an empty panel offers everything a panel can hold, grouped by kind:

Each option is badged Linked or Static so you know what you're getting. A linked panel knows where its data came from and can be refreshed. A static one is a picture.

Chart Panels

A chart panel is where most of a figure's work happens.

From a data table charts any table in the project. From an image analysis or From flow cytometry offers the chart types those workspaces produce, such as object counts by image, coverage over time, population frequencies, or a median-intensity heatmap.

Click Edit on a chart panel for the full editor: chart type, axes and labels, clustering for heatmaps, statistical comparisons, and appearance. That editor has its own page, Customize a chart.

A plot drawn live from flow data (a density, scatter, contour, or histogram panel from Cytometry) opens a different editor. It keeps the panel's title, subtitle, and annotation, and adds a Plot section of its own: plot type, axis scales and labels, color scheme, text sizes, and switches for gate outlines, gridlines, axis values, and the legend. Every control starts on Same as analysis. Take a setting over to style the panel for the page it will land on, and pick Same as analysis again to hand it back, so the panel follows the analysis once more.

Charts built from manual data can be saved back out. The editor's data panel offers Save to Data Tables for data you typed in, Save changes to update the table a chart came from, and Save as new to fork it.

Keeping a Chart Current

A linked chart never updates on its own. It shows the numbers as of when you built it, which is what stops a figure changing under you the day before a deadline.

When the source moves, the panel grows a strip saying so, with a Refresh button. Press it when you want the new numbers. If the source has been deleted, the panel says so and keeps drawing the last picture it had, so an old figure doesn't turn into an error message.

A plot drawn live from flow data is the exception: it redraws from its analysis every time the figure opens. If the analysis is saved again while the figure is open, the same strip appears, and Refresh pulls in the new events while keeping everything you set in the panel's editor.

Refresh data from source and an Open link to whatever the panel came from are also in its menu, and the sidebar's Sources section lists every analysis that contributed to the figure, each one a link back. When the source has been deleted, the Open link goes away with it, since there is nowhere left to open.

Image Panels

Image panels take anything in the project (samples, gallery, analysis output) or an upload. Accepted formats are the usual image types plus TIFF and PDF, and a PDF is converted to an image as it uploads.

Resize zooms the image within its panel so you can crop to the interesting part without leaving the figure. A panel showing a multi-channel or z-stack image remembers its channel, slice, projection, and enhancement settings, so what's in the figure is the view you set up, not the raw first plane.

Text Panels

Text panels hold captions, legends, and the "n = 3, mean ± SEM" line every figure needs. Formatting covers bold, italic, underline, strikethrough, highlight, subscript, and superscript, plus font size, horizontal alignment, and vertical anchoring to the top, middle, or bottom of the panel. Fit text to panel sizes it automatically.

Text panels are skipped in the letter sequence by default, since a caption isn't panel C.

Annotations

Open a panel in focused mode to draw on it: brush, rectangle, ellipse, polygon, arrow, and scale bar, plus text labels and a counter, with color, fill, stroke width, and opacity. Eraser removes one, Delete All clears the panel.

Focused mode has its own undo and redo, and the arrow keys step you between panels without leaving it.

Panel Labels

Panels are lettered automatically. The Panel Labels section sets the style for the whole figure, and any individual panel can hide its letter from the panel's own menu.

Status, Review, and Sharing

A figure carries a status from Draft through Needs Review, In Review, and Approved to Archived, set from the top of the sidebar.

The Activity panel is where the figure gets discussed and signed off, with comments and approvals.

Project members with view-only access can open, present, and export a figure and take part in its review, but the layout, staging, and panel controls aren't offered.

Presenting

Present puts the whole figure full screen with the editor chrome hidden, which is the version you want on a projector.

For one panel at a time, use a panel's Fullscreen button. That starts a slideshow at that panel, with the figure's title above and the panel letter in the corner. Arrow keys step, Esc exits, and empty panels are skipped. A chart drawn live from flow data has no saved picture to show in this mode and says so rather than showing a blank slide.

Exporting

Export figure in the sidebar footer writes a PNG or an SVG, at a size asked the way a journal asks for it: a Width of Single column (89 mm), Double column (183 mm), Slide (254 mm) or Custom in millimetres, and a Resolution of 150, 300, or 600 DPI. The panel shows the pixel dimensions those choices produce, so you know the file meets a submission requirement before you write it. An SVG prints at the chosen width at any resolution.

The SVG is built rather than photographed. Each chart's bars, points, axis ticks and gridlines arrive as objects you can select one at a time, panel labels and captions are live text you can retype and restyle, and every panel is its own named layer. Microscopy images stay as embedded pictures inside the vector document, which is correct — a photograph has no vector form — and a cytometry panel keeps its gate outlines editable on top of its events. Open the file in Illustrator or Inkscape and recolour a bar or move a label without touching anything else.

For a single chart at publication resolution, export from the chart itself rather than the figure: chart export offers the same widths and resolutions in PNG, SVG, and TIFF, plus copying straight to the clipboard.

Organizing

Figures sort by last modified, creation date, name, or status, and filter by status and modification date. Folders and stars work as they do elsewhere. Deleting a figure sends it to Trash for 30 days, and a folder has to be empty before it can be deleted.