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Chart options are global settings that impact overall chart appearance or set defaults for chart elements. Chart options can be specified at any place in the input file, but typically they are specified before anything else. The syntax is as below.
option = value, ... ;
The following chart options are defined.
msc
This option takes a chart design name as parameter and sets, how the chart will be drawn. It is usually specified as the first thing in the file before any other chart option. However, it can be specified multiple times, in which case its effect takes place downward from the chart option. If not specified then the ‘plain’ design is used. Note that this option can be overridden from the command line and also from the Windows GUI. Also note that only full designs can be applied with the ‘=’ symbol, partial designs shall use ‘+=’. See Chart Designs for more on chart designs.
hscale
This option takes a number or auto
, and specifies the default
horizontal distance between entities. The default is 1, so to space
entities wider apart, use a larger value. When specifying auto
entity positions will be automatically set according to the spacing
needs of elements. In this case the pos
attribute of entities will be ignored
except when influencing the order of the entities. See the end of
Defining Entities for examples.
Similar to msc
, if you specify this attribute multiple times, the
last one takes precedence.
numbering
This option takes yes
or no
value, the default is no.
Any element you define will take the default value of its number
attribute from this option. See more on numbering in Numbering.
compress
This option takes a boolean value, and defaults to off.
Any element you define will take the default value of its compress
attribute from this option. See more on numbering in Compression and Vertical Spacing.
vspacing
Can be set to a number interpreted in pixels or to the string compress
.
Governs how much vertical space is added before each element (can be negative).
This option is another form (superset) of the compress
option;
compress=yes
is equivalent to vspacing=compress
, whereas
compress=no
is equivalent to vspacing=0
.
angle
Specifies the default value for arrow slanting. Its value is measured in degrees, can take values from 0 to 45 degrees and its default value is zero.
indicator
Similar to the compress
option above this chart option can be
used to influence the default value of the indicator
attribute
for grouped entities and boxes. The simplest way to turn all indicators
on or off is to specify this chart option at the beginning of the file.
auto_heading
Sets the default value for the ‘auto_heading’ attribute of ‘newpage’ commands. Setting to yes will cause all ‘newpage;’ commands to create an entity heading on the subsequent page making additional ‘heading;’ commands unnecessary. The default is no.
classic_parallel_layout
If set to yes, parallel blocks are laid out with an old algorithm, which allows and ignores overlaps between the elements in the different parallel blocks. Defaults to no, and is kept only for backwards compatibility.
pedantic
This option takes a boolean value. It defaults to no, but can also
be set by the command line or using Edit|Preferences...
on Windows.
When turned on, then all entities must be defined before being used. If an
entity name is not recognized in an arrow or box definition an
error is generated. However, the implicit definition is accepted.
Setting pedantic affects only the definitions after it and you can
set it multiple times on and off. However it makes little sense.
text.ident
text.format
text.color
text.wrap
This chart option can be used to set the default text format. It will be
the default for all labels. Any styles or attributes specified will
overwrite the formatting specified here. Its syntax is the same as that of
the text.*
attributes.
numbering.pre
numbering.post
These options specify what shall be prepended and appended to label numbers. Their default value is the empty string and a semicolon followed by a space, respectively. The value of these options are ignored when a label number is inserted due to the ‘\N’ escape sequence. See Numbering for more.
numbering.format
Specifies the format of automatic numbering for labels. Can be an arbitrary string (usually quoted) and may also contain formatting escapes. Any occurrence of ‘123’, ‘arabic’, ‘iii’, ‘roman’, ‘abc’, ‘letters’ (or uppercase versions) will be replaced to the actual number in the specified format. The string can contain multiple of the strings above, that will be interpreted as a multi-level numbering format. It is an error to describe more levels than the chart has at the location of the option. In this case an error is printed and the option is not changed. Describin fewer levels will result in Msc-generator omitting the top level numbers from labels. For example, if the numbering is at 2.4.1 and one specifies ‘123.123’ for number format, Msc-generator will display only 4.1. Such truncation, however, will not change the number of levels, merely how the number is displayed.
numbering.append
This option can be used to append a new level to numbering. Its syntax is the same as for numbering.format. E.g., opening a second level of arabic numbers separated by a colon from the first level can be done by specifying ‘.123’ (use quotation marks). It is possible to add more than levels at once. All added levels start from the value of 1 (or ‘i’ or ‘a’, for roman numbers or letters, respectively).
numbering.increment
Sets the amount added to the number for every new numbered element. Specifying negative values will make counting go backwards.
background.color
background.gradient
These are similar to fill.*
attributes and specify the background
color of the chart. By default the background is set to white in the plain
design of every language. You can change the background color multiple times,
each change taking effect at the place where you issue the background chart option.
This is usefult to split your chart to multiple sections visually.
By setting background.color=none
the background will be transparent for the
rest of the chart.
file.info
It takes a (quoted) string of human-readable text as value. It is useful to describe what is this file and what it contains. It is used so far only to annotate design libraries, so that if you open an OLE object with a shape not present in your system you can get some info on what file it is from. You can specifythis option multiple times their values get concatenated.
file.url
It takes a quoted URL as value providing a potential place to download this file from.
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comment.line.*
comment.fill.*
If you have comments on the chart these govern the background of the comments and the attributes of the line separating the comments from the chart. As with background changing them applies downwards from the point of the chart option. See Notes and Comments for more information on comments.
Next: Multiple Pages, Previous: Signalling Chart Attributes and Styles, Up: Signalling Chart Language Reference [Contents]