You’re preparing a molecular model and carefully added a set of labels to atoms, residues, or molecules — only to find that they seem to vanish as you zoom out or pan across your system in SAMSON. If this sounds familiar, you’re not alone: controlling the visibility of labels is a common frustration among scientists working with complex molecular data. Fortunately, SAMSON gives you fine control over when labels appear or disappear, and doing it right can drastically improve both clarity and visual aesthetics in your models. ✨
Here’s how label visibility actually works in SAMSON, and how you can tune it to fit your needs.
Dynamic Visibility Based on Zoom
Labels in SAMSON are designed to automatically adapt their visibility depending on your zoom level. For example:
- Zooming out hides smaller objects (like atom labels) and shows only higher-level nodes (like molecules).
- Zooming in reveals detailed labels, such as atoms and residues.
This dynamic behavior prevents clutter in your viewport but can be disorienting if you’re not expecting it.
Control Visibility in the Document View
Besides zoom-dependent visibility, SAMSON allows you to explicitly show or hide labels using the Document view. Labels are listed like any other node in your hierarchy. Simply tick or untick them to toggle their visibility.
Fine-Tuning Visibility with Display Radii
To go a level deeper, you can modify the maximum and minimum display radii of each label, which define the zoom level thresholds at which that label will appear or vanish. This is especially useful when you want certain labels to always remain visible regardless of zoom — a common need when preparing visuals for presentations or publications.
To customize this setting:
- Select the label you want to control.
- Open the Inspector panel.
- Locate the Minimum display radius and Maximum display radius fields and adjust them accordingly.
Quick Tips for Easier Visibility Management
- Use naming conventions for labels to group and manage them more easily in the Document view.
- Contrary to intuition, label visibility is not persistent across all zoom levels unless you set appropriate display radii.
- Combine visibility control with label colorization to subtly direct viewer attention without overwhelming them with information.
Label visibility isn’t just about aesthetics — it’s about clarity, especially when working with multi-scale systems where too much information can become noise. By mastering these visibility tools, you’ll gain more control over how your molecular data is presented and perceived.
To learn more about working with labels, editing fonts, colors, or moving them around your scene, read the full documentation page: Labeling in SAMSON.
SAMSON and all SAMSON Extensions are free for non-commercial use. You can get SAMSON at www.samson-connect.net.