Robins's Visual Chart Form Tips

Drawing Lines and Shapes

This page created 1 Sep 2014

Hosted by Terry's TMG Tips

Topics Included in this Article
Drawing Lines	Adding lines and curves to your chart
Drawing Shapes	Adding shapes to your chart
Changing Properties	Changing line widths, colour, etc
Using Fill in Shapes	Controlling the fill within a shape
Editing Lines and Shapes	Editing a line or a shape
Re-Ordering Lines and Shapes	Changing the view of overlapping shapes and lines

Drawing Lines

The VCF menu bar provides 4 forms of line that can be drawn. Click the menu button, then click on the chart space where you want to start the object.

Button	Description (examples shown when selected)
	A straight line between 2 points
	A double straight line between 2 points
	A poly line – a series of joined straight lines Double-click to finish the line.
	A poly curve – The shape is controlled by pairs of additional points that act like magnets (in red circles)

Drawing Shapes

The VCF menu bar provides 4 forms of shape that can be drawn. All these shapes can be filled.

Button	Description (examples shown when selected)
	A rectangle
	An ellipse
	A closed poly line
	A closed poly curve – where the shape is controlled by pairs of additional points

Changing Properties

Select a line or a shape, then right-click > Detail Properties. A dialogue opens where on the Line tab, you can change the line width, line style and line colour (see Limitations of Lines). Also see the next section.

Using Fill in Shapes

Select a shape, then right-click > Detail Properties. A dialogue opens where on the Fill tab, you can change the fill width, fill colour, fill background colour, fill pattern.

Editing Lines and Shapes

Some drawing objects are obvious to resize. Single and double straight lines, rectangles and ellipses all act like other packages (like Microsoft Word, etc).

poly line, poly curve and closed poly line, closed poly curve shapes require special editing facilities.

To access these editing features, select a poly drawing object to show the resizing handles.

Click the button which has just become enabled and a new set of handles will appear.

Click then drag on a handle and shape will change.

For poly line and closed poly line shapes, you can add intermediate points or delete points. If you are on a line segment, then click will add point, while if the mouse pointer is on a point, then CTRL + click will delete that point.

Re-Ordering Lines and Shapes

Select a shape, then right-click > Bring to Front or Send to Back. When there are more than two overlapping objects it may take several of these action to achieve the right result. My method is the following. Select the object that is to be on top and send to back. Then select the object that is to be the second from the top of the pile and send it to back. Continue doing this successively until the last object sent to the back, when the result required now shows.

Using a filled rectangle with no outline sent behind a couple’s boxes to highlight them.

NOTES:

The single layer moves Bring Forward and Send Back don’t always work as expected.
If one of the objects is an image, then certain operations will suddenly bring that image to the top level. You may have to repeat such a sequence to correct that.

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