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9.2.3 Entity Attributes ¶

The following entity attributes can only be set at the definition of the entity.

label

This specifies the text to be displayed for the entity. It can contain multiple lines or any text formatting character. See Text Formatting. If the label contains non alphanumeric characters, it must be quoted between double quotation marks. The default is the name of the entity.

pos

This attribute takes a floating point number as value and defaults to zero. It specifies the relative horizontal offset from the entity specified by the relative attribute or by the default position of the entity. The value of 1 corresponds to the default distance between entities. See a previous section for an example. Grouped entities cannot have this attribute.

relative

This attribute takes the name of another entity and specifies the horizontal position used as a base for the pos attribute. Grouped entities cannot have this attribute.

shape

This attribute takes the name of the shape you want for the entity headings. See Entity Shapes.

shape.size

This attribute specifies the size of the shape to use for the entity headings. Only has effect if a valid shape is specified via the shape attribute. It takes one of tiny, small, normal, big or huge with small as default. You can also use auto, which makes the shape large enough to contain the label. This setting is valid only for shapes that define a position for the label. (See the T command in Defining Shapes.) For shapes that define a label position if you set a specific size, the label’s size is scaled to fit the shape (well, the label position in it). In contrast, if you set auto, the size of the shape is scaled so that it fits the size of the label.

collapsed

This attribute can be used to collapse a group entity. Only group entities can have this attribute.

indicator

If set to yes (default) a small indicator will be displayed in a collapsed entity and also for any arcs that disappeared because of the collapse of this entity. On non-collapsed group entities it has no effect. Only grouped entities can have this attribute.

The following attributes can be changed at any location and have their effect downwards from that location.

show

This is a binary attribute, defaulting to yes. If set to no, the entity is not shown at all, including its vertical line. This is useful to omit certain entities from parts of the chart where their vertical line would just crowd the image visually. The commands ‘show’ and ‘hide’ followed by entity names are shorthands for setting or clearing these attributes. See more on entity headings in Entity Headings.

active

This is a binary attribute, defaulting to no. If set the entity line becomes a thin long rectange indicating that the entity is active. You can set the fill of the rectangle via the ‘vfill.*’ attributes. The commands ‘activate’ and ‘deactivate’ are shorthand for setting or clearing this attribute. Uisng the keywords is equivalent to setting the attributes, except that when the keywords are used just after an arrow, the activation/deactivation will take place immediately at the tip of the arrow, and not after.

color

This sets the color of the entity text, the box around the text and the vertical line to the same color. It is a shorthand to specify text.color, line.color and vline.color to the same value.

line.*

vline.*

fill.*

vfill.*

text.*

shadow.*

See Common Attributes for the description of these attributes.

aline.*

atext.*

arrow.*

These attributes can be used to set the line, text and arrowhead attributes of arrows starting from this entity. Their use is described in Arrow Appearance. Note they do not apply to block arrows.