Next: , Previous: , Up: Specifying Entities   [Contents]


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.

ex43_cshex43
ex40_cshex40
ex41_cshex41

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.

ex42_cshex42

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.