Label Text Manipulation

DRAW Reference Manual

Labelling : Creating and Manipulating Labels : Label Text Manipulation

Character height and spacing, and line spacing are all definable, as is the text justification.

The set of attributes that control the appearance of a Label text is:


CHEI	character height (default 4 mm)
LHEI	letter height (0.8* character height)
CSPA	character spacing factor (default 0)
LSPA	text line spacing factor (default 0)

Initial (default) values of all these attributes are cascaded to GLABs from their owning LAYE. All the above attributes are set directly, for example:


CHEI 6	(LHEI automatically set to 4.8)
CSPA 1
LSPA 1

Refer to Miscellaneous Text Facilities for further information about the character height and letter height attributes.

CSPA and LSPA may be given negative values. For CSPA, small negative values (of the order of -.1) will cause text to become compressed (values much smaller than this are not useful). For LSPA, values of the order -.1 will compress lines; values of the order -3 will reverse the order of lines. (Limits are -10 to +10 for LSPA, -0.5 to +10 for CSPA.)

Figure 12:6.: Label Text - Character Spacing and Line Spacing illustrates the effects of varying the character spacing and line spacing.

Figure 12:6.

Label Text - Character Spacing and Line Spacing

Text justification and vertical alignment are controlled by the settings of the JUST and ALIG attributes, which may have the following alternative settings:


JUST L	Text left justified (default)
JUST C	Text centre justified
JUST R	Text right justified right
ALIG BB	Text aligned with bottom of body (default)
ALIG HB	Text aligned halfway up body
ALIG TB	Text aligned with top of body
ALIG BASE	Text aligned with base of first character (on first line of text)

Here, horizontal justification is relative to the Label origin, vertical alignment is relative to the text body - the area occupied by the text. The text base ignores text descenders (for example, the tail of a ‘p’ or a ‘y’).

Figure 12:7.: Horizontal Justification and Vertical Alignment illustrates the effect of varying these attributes.

Figure 12:7.

Horizontal Justification and Vertical Alignment

In Figure 12:8.: Text Base/Body Alignments, the

symbol shows the text string origins for BBODY and BASE alignments. For a multi-line text string (as shown), the origin is at the baseline of the first line of text.

Figure 12:8.

Text Base/Body Alignments

The Label FONT attribute controls the Label text font. Refer to Miscellaneous Text Facilities for further information.

The TXCOLOUR attribute controls the text colour. Refer to Colours and Styles, for further information.