Annotations appear at the top of the diagram. Comments appear at the bottom. Decorations appear anywhere on the diagram page that you like. Decorations work like this: Each time the diagram is displayed, it looks in the current directory for a file called decorat1.ano, decorat2.ano and decorat3.ano. If any of these files exist, they are read, interpreted and the contents are displayed.
The purpose of this dialog box is to specify what content, or text, is placed on the page. There are 10 variable strings that you can specify to be placed about the diagram. Those strings can be specified in this dialog box.
Note: you must have a decorateN.ano file that specifies these variables in order for this to work. There is a file called streets.ano in the \magic\bonus\annotate directory. Try copying this to your main DATA directory and naming it decorat1.ano. Then fill in the values from 1 to 10 and see what appears! Delete the decorate1.ano if you want to stop displaying these items. Edit it if you want to change how/where they appear.
The structure of this file is the same as the file that displays the key at the bottom of the diagram, (default.key) each ascii line displays one item. That item is either text or a built-in graphic. Each line is ascii delimited and contains the following elements:
x, y, angle, scale, width, color, #object/text/%DecorationNumber,[Font]
| • | x,y is the position to place the item (0,0 is lower left of diagram; 1000,1000 is top right of diagram) |
| • | angle is the angle to display it on. For graphics, 0 is east, 90 north, etc. For text it is opposite. |
| • | scale is how large to make the item. For graphics, this is relative to the original graphic (usually use 1). For text, it is the number of diagram units. (same as labels, and the x,y value above) For text, start at about 30 and work from there. |
| • | Width is the linewidth. This only applies to graphics |
| • | Color is an RGB value that describes the color. Some sample values are: red = 255; green = 65280; blue = 16711680; magenta = 16711935; cyan = 16776960; yellow = 65535; white = 16777215; ltgray = 9868950; dkgray = 4934475. This only applies to graphics, not text. |
| • | #object/text is either an object number or text. The most common objects available are those in the symbol key for Intersection Magic. The entire alphabet is also available by using the ascii value for a letter, so #65 is the letter A. |
Rather than piecing together the letters in the simple plotter font available from the objects, you can specify a piece of text for this parameter. In that case, the text will be displayed using standard Windows text routines.
Finally, by specifying %1 thru %10, you can cause the display of text from this decorations dialog box.
| • | The last item is optional and may contain a font name. The font name must exactly match the system font name desired. |