The PDF Manual.
Modified: November 20, 2021
Download it from the Files panel in your Insight-live.com account or from the home page at https://digitalfire.com (current downloads only include the program file, manual, starter recipe, materials - overrides data is built in).
We moved functionality to a private account at Insight-Live.com - because people now expect to get at their data from any device anywhere. And for our survival. Ceramic lab work is much bigger than glaze chemistry, it is a physical world where testing, observation, record-keeping are vital. Insight-Live is about maintaining that data. Its recipes share pictures, they have firing schedules, notes, development history, testing data, links, they belong to projects. And they accumulate into the thousands and are easy to find and compare.
Desktop Insight, by default, opens and saves recipes to its INSIGHTDATA.DB recipe database file (that file is in your documents/insight folder, it can be uploaded and imported into Insight-live). If Desktop Insight does not find the INSIGHTDATA.DB file on startup, it imports, into its database, all the recipe files (e.g. RCP, RCX) it finds in your documents/insight/recipe folder (it does not erase the original files, but no longer uses them). From then on, when you choose File -> Open (not File -> Open File System) you open recipes from its database (using the Recipe Database Window). When you Save you save to the database. See page 94 of the manual for more information.
Because you have to be able to compare ten recipes side-by-side. For physics as well as chemistry. And people need to be able to find thousands on any device from anywhere.
Insight FAQ
There is a direct relationship between the way ceramic glazes fire and their chemistry. Insight is a calculation tool anyone can use to learn and harness the power of glaze chemistry.
Without glaze chemistry you'll never really have control and you could be a slave to your suppliers or the trafficing in recipes that never work.
Overwhelmed by glaze chemistry? Try starting here.
"I just want to learn as much as I can so that I can come up with custom glazes that do what I want them to do. I don't want to be a slave to others' ideas, nor do I want to hope for someone to find a miracle glaze for me. This is where I differ a bit from my mentors."
"I bought your version 4.1 for DOS many years ago and am thinking of upgrading? Will be running it under Windows XP. Your current evaluation copy looks quite interesting. I am looking forward to finally understanding glaze calculations."
"I will be formulating glasses to match a 104 COE. Thanks so much for your help, I am looking forward to using the program successfully to get the glass I am looking for. One real nice benefit for me is that you have frit compositions for my calculations as bases I will use - this alone is worth the price."
"I re-read chapters 5 through 7 in the book of mastering cone 6 glazes - those chapters made a world of more sense since reading Digital fire information on transparent base glaze 20x5 and the M vs. W version !"
"I just opened the kiln this morning and for the first time in my 30+ years. Total silence. There was not even one ping of crazing. It is said that some time the most monumental events go by in a whisper, but this one needs a shout: THANK YOU, Tony Hansen and all your team at Digitalfire for your persistent vision to put a technically valuable glaze chemistry tool, INSIGHT, in the hands of potters."
"The program really is changing the way I think about glazes."