9.2.1 Entity Positioning ¶
Entities are placed on the chart from left to right in the order of
definition. This can be influenced by the pos and
relative attributes.
Specifying pos will place the entity left or right from its default
location. E.g., specifying pos=-0.25 for entity B makes B
to be 25% closer to its left neighbour. Thus pos shall be specified in
terms of the unit distance between entities. (Which is 130 points - a historic
value kept for backwards compatibility.)
The next entity C, however, will always be from a unit distance from the
entity defined just before it, so in order to specify a 25% larger space, on the
right side of entity B, one needs to specify pos=0.25 for
C.
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The attribute relative can be used to specify the base of the
pos attribute. Take the following input, for example.
In this case C will be placed halfway between A and
B.
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Note that specifying the hscale=auto chart option makes entity
positining automatic. This setting overrides pos values with
the exception that it maintains the order of the entities that can be
influenced by setting their pos attribute. See Chart Options.
In most cases it is simpler to use hscale=auto, you need pos
only to fine-tune a chart, if automatic layout is not doing a good job.