Preferences Configuration

The preferences window gathers everything that can be set on an IsoFind workstation: ninety-four options across fifteen sections, themselves grouped into four families. This page describes them all, section by section.

Edit → Preferences

The gear icon in the title bar leads there too, and the command palette finds it by typing "preferences".

How the window is organised

Navigation is a list on the left, where sections are gathered into four groups: Workstation for what belongs to this machine, Science for what affects the calculations, System for administration, and Extensions for whatever plugins add.

A search field filters options by their label, whatever section they sit in. That is the shortest route when you know what you are looking for but not where it is filed.

The badges

Badge	What it means
Restart	The setting is saved right away, but its full effect waits for the next launch.
Air-gap	A network option, greyed out on a machine installed in isolated mode. Network mode is set by the installer and cannot be changed from within the software.
Developer	Locked until developer mode is enabled in the Advanced section.
Soon	Visible but inactive, waiting for the feature it will control.

Saving and cancelling

The window works in deferred mode. Your changes accumulate and the footer shows how many are pending; nothing is written until you save, and Cancel drops them all at once.

A few settings are exceptions and apply as you go, because you can only judge them by seeing them: theme, zoom, font size. They are saved along with the rest when you confirm.

A missing section is not an empty one. Modules only appears if your licence or an installed add-on opens modules beyond those of your edition, and options reserved for a higher edition are greyed out with their reason rather than hidden.

Workstation

What belongs to this machine and has no reason to follow a user from one workstation to another.

General

Setting	Effect	Default
Interface language Restart	French or English. The interface follows immediately, the window's native menus at the next launch.	French
On startup	What IsoFind opens on arrival: home page, restored previous session, Samples or Nexus.	Home page
Minimise to system tray	Keeps the server running for a quick restart. See also "When I close the window" under Workspace.	Off
Close behaviour	A button that makes the choice be asked again at the next close.	Action
Auto-save	Saves work in progress without intervention.	On
Auto-save interval	From 1 to 60 minutes. Greyed out if auto-save is off.	5 minutes
Confirm before deleting	Asks for confirmation before any permanent deletion.	On
Date format	ISO 8601, French or Anglo-Saxon. Applies to display and to exports alike.	ISO 8601

Appearance

Setting	Effect	Default
Theme	System, IsoFind light, IsoFind dark or IsoFind slate. System mode follows the Windows theme and changes with it.	System
Font size	From 10 to 20 pixels.	14 px
Compensate Windows scaling	At 125 or 150 %, the working area gets too small for the interface. The correction never goes below what a screen at 100 % would show.	On
Interface zoom	From 50 to 200 %. The same as the View menu shortcuts, and it combines with the compensation above.	100 %
Compact mode	Reduces margins and row height to show more.	Off
Animations	Turn off for smoother behaviour on an older machine.	On
Monospace font	Used by the notebook, IGL and the logs. Leave empty for the system font.	Empty

Dark mode reduces eye strain when examining spectra or heat maps in low-light environments.

Workspace

The largest section, nineteen settings, because it decides the shape of the window itself.

Setting	Effect	Default
Navigation	By tabs: one central area, several pages open at once, splittable. By pages: the sidebar and one page at a time, as in earlier versions.	By tabs
Hidden pages	Removes the ticked pages from the sidebar. The current page is never hidden.	None
Main menu	Full bar or single button. The button gives the whole row back to the content; the command palette already covers quick access.	Single button
When I close the window	Quit everything, or keep the server running in the notification area. In that second case, the icon is the only way back, or out.	Quit everything
Status bar	A permanent line at the bottom of the window: signing certificate, resolved IGL, running tasks.	Shown
Hidden indicators	Right-clicking the bar gives the same list. An indicator with nothing to say does not show, even when ticked.	None
Reopen docked panels	Dock sizes and tab order are kept in all cases.	On
Reopen floating windows	Those left open come back to their place and size. Declining does not forget them: reopening one by hand finds it there.	On
Icon rail instead of tabs	Saves space. Four titles read at a glance, fourteen icons are deciphered one by one.	Off
Full-width bottom dock	The bottom dock runs under the side docks instead of sitting between them.	Off
Detach panels into windows	A detached panel opens in its own window, movable to a second screen. Four at most.	On
Detach by dragging out of the window	The tab's context menu stays available in all cases.	On
Opening screen	Secondary, primary, or the main window's screen. Falls back to the primary when there is only one. A panel dropped outside the window opens where it is dropped; this setting only concerns the menu.	Secondary screen
Split direction for multi-panel windows	Side by side or one above the other.	Side by side
Keep detached windows on top	Useful on a single screen, redundant on two.	Off
Reopen detached windows	Only those still open at the end of the session come back, with their position and proportions, if their screen is still there.	On
Default notebook kernel	Python, R, SQL, Markdown or IGL. A saved notebook keeps its own: its code was written in that kernel.	Python
Rich notebook output	Renders tables and plots rather than their text-only representation.	On
Syntax highlighting	Colours the code in the notebook and the IGL editor.	On

Science

What affects the calculations and how results are presented.

Analysis

These values are defaults. A study that declares its own replaces them for itself alone, without touching what is set here.

Setting	Effect	Default
Display precision	From 1 to 10 decimals. Does not affect computation precision, only rendering.	4
Default units	Per mille, parts per million or percentage.	Per mille
Isotope notation	Typographic (δ⁵³Cr) or ASCII (delta53Cr). IGL source code stays in strict ASCII whatever this setting says.	Typographic
Default standard	Applied when a dataset does not declare its own.	Empty
Relative mode	A difference between deltas does not depend on the standard. Always declared, never inferred from a missing standard.	Off
Show uncertainties	Adds the uncertainty column to tables and exports.	On
Uncertainty propagation	First-order linear, Monte Carlo, or none. Greyed out if uncertainties are not shown.	Linear

Nexus

Setting	Effect	Default
Show minimap	Reduced view of the workflow canvas.	On
Snap to grid	Automatic node alignment when dragging.	On
Grid size	From 10 to 50 pixels. Greyed out without snapping.	20 px
Identification tolerance	Largest gap allowed between a candidate and the observation, from 0.01 to 5 per mille.	0.5 ‰
Candidates kept	How many solutions are kept after an identification, from 1 to 50.	5
Random seed	A fixed seed makes two runs identical to the digit. Zero draws at random.	0

Fix the seed before any run intended for a report. A result you cannot reproduce exactly is hard to defend, and this setting costs nothing.

IGL

Isotope modelling language and engine. IsoFind adapts to whatever is installed on the machine and imposes nothing on IGL. A banner at the top of the section shows the resolved version, its location and where it came from.

Setting	Effect	Default
Binary location	Empty for automatic resolution: pinned path, IGL_HOME, user location, %ProgramFiles%\IGL, then the copy shipped with IsoFind.	Empty
IGL_HOME	Root containing databases and spec.	Empty
Default profile	Core, Identification or Extended. The set of capabilities the built-in editor accepts.	Identification
Execution engine	The Rust engine is shipped and self-contained. Nexus takes the lowered model and adds the ML layer.	igl-engine
Active IGDB databases	Fractionation databases made available to models.	None
PHREEQC coupling Air-gap	Requires the batch version, which is not PhreeqcI.	Off
phreeqc.exe path	An absolute path is required, since the engine runs in a temporary directory.	Empty
Keep intermediate files	model.iglir.json and results.json after a run.	On
Format on save	Applies igl fmt at each save.	Off
Log engine calls Developer	Traces every invocation of the IGL binary.	Off

Reports and exports

Setting	Effect	Default
Report language	Follow the interface, or force French or English whatever is displayed.	Follow the interface
Number format Soon	Decimal comma or decimal point.	Comma
Laboratory branding	Gives up the laboratory header on this machine. It cannot add one the licence does not grant.	On
Sign ISOF exports	ECDSA P-256 signature by the laboratory certificate.	On
Reports folder	Where reports are written. Information only.	Set by the installation

System

AI assistant

The model runs locally, served by Ollama. No data leaves the machine.

Setting	Effect	Default
Enable the assistant	Opens the section: without it, the eight settings below stay greyed out.	Off
Ollama host	Address of the local service.	http://127.0.0.1:11434
Model	Name of the model served by Ollama.	Empty
Context window	From 512 to 131,072 tokens.	8,192
Allowed tools	Nothing ticked means all of them. Conversation mode additionally removes everything that writes.	All
Math rendering	Displays formulas rather than their source.	On
Keep conversations	Written to the machine's encrypted database, never in the clear. Turned off, the history stays empty.	On
Maximum agent turns	From 1 to 50. An agent going in circles has to be stopped. The ceiling is fixed when the session starts.	12
Per-turn timeout	From 5 to 1800 seconds. A 14B model on a laptop without a graphics card can take a minute. Cutting too early fails work that was about to succeed.	180 s

Extensions

Setting	Effect	Default
Extensions folder	Where plugins are installed.	Set by the installation
Require a valid signature	Refuses any extension whose signature does not verify.	On
Allow unsigned extensions Developer	For local development only.	Off
Update the registry automatically Air-gap	Queries the online catalogue at startup.	Off

Modules

This section only appears if your licence or an installed add-on opens modules beyond those of your edition. Modules are grouped by the offer that opened them, and each group as well as each module carries a switch that shows or hides its pages in the sidebar.

These switches hide pages, they do not remove the module: its routes stay served, and the current page is never hidden. What a module grants is decided by the licence at startup, and no interface setting can contradict it.

Data and backup

Setting	Effect	Default
Database location	Path of the encrypted database. Information only.	Set by the installation
Scheduled backups	Full copies at a regular interval, distinct from the auto-save of work in progress.	On
Interval	From 1 to 168 hours.	24 h
Backup retention	From 1 to 3650 days. Beyond that, copies are deleted.	30 days
Preferences profile	Exports your settings to deploy a second machine identically. Settings locked by policy are excluded.	Action

Security

Controls two distinct aspects of workstation security: opening the local API to external scripts, and managing the administrator recovery code. A counter in the navigation list flags pending requests.

External API access

IsoFind exposes a local API on 127.0.0.1:8001 that allows Python scripts or third-party tools to query your database from the same machine. This setting determines who can connect to it.

Mode	Behaviour	Recommended use
Disabled	No access from outside the software. Maximum protection.	Default. Sensitive workstations, air-gap.
Local access without confirmation	Any script on this machine can access the API without a confirmation prompt.	Trusted workstation, personal use.
Access with manual authorisation	Each new programme attempting to connect triggers a confirmation window. You choose to allow or deny, with an option to remember the decision.	Shared or semi-open environment.

In local access without confirmation mode, any software on the machine can read and export your entire database without any alert. In manual authorisation mode, identification is based on the executable path, which can be spoofed by software with elevated privileges. Disabled mode remains the only option guaranteeing complete protection.

Pending requests and authorised programs

When "access with manual authorisation" mode is active, connection attempts awaiting validation appear in the Pending requests section. Already authorised programs are listed under Authorised programs, with the ability to revoke their access individually.

A notification banner automatically appears at the bottom of the main interface as soon as a request is pending, even if the preferences panel is closed.

Administrator recovery code

Available in multi-user mode only. This code allows the administrator password to be reset without access to the current session. It is single-use: after use, a new code is automatically generated.

Generating a new code immediately invalidates the previous one. If you have already noted a code, it will no longer work as soon as a new one is created. Keep the code printed or on a physical medium stored away from the computer.

The Generate a new code button displays the code in plain text once, in a modal window. It will no longer be accessible after that window is closed. To use it in case of lost access, see Activating a Licence and the recovery procedure on the login page.

Network

Setting	Effect	Default
Network mode	Set by the installer, not changeable from within the software. It is what greys out the options marked Air-gap.	Set by the installation
Community database Air-gap	Allows the online community catalogue to be queried.	Off
Proxy	Proxy server for outbound access.	Empty
Update channel Soon	Stable, beta or no checking.	Stable

Advanced

Setting	Effect	Default
Developer mode	Unlocks the settings marked developer elsewhere in this window.	Off
Log level	Debug, info, warnings, or errors only.	Info
Write logs to disk	Keeps the logs beyond the current session.	Off
WebGL acceleration Restart	Used by the 3D views and the plumes. Turn it off in case of display problems on certain graphics cards.	On
Compute threads	From 0 to 64. Zero lets the engine decide.	0
Local cache	Clears temporary data without touching the database.	Action
All preferences	Resets every option in every section to its default value.	Action

Developer mode exposes internal logs and session diagnostics, and unlocks settings that bypass guarantees, including running unsigned extensions. Only enable it at the request of IsoFind technical support, and turn it off afterwards.

Diagnostic

This section has no settings. It reports the state of the machine's dependencies: the IGL engine and its version, PHREEQC if it is coupled, the R service, the Ollama service, the laboratory certificate, the database. Each line says whether the dependency was resolved, where, and what is missing if anything.

This is the first page to open when a feature stays inert with no error message. A dependency that cannot be found shows up here at once, where elsewhere it reads as a button that does nothing.

Extensions

This group is empty on a fresh installation. An extension can add its own section here, with its own settings, which then live in the same window and follow the same saving rules as the rest.