Label Text Manipulation

Character height and spacing, and line spacing are all definable, as is the text justification.

The set of attributes that control the appearance of a Label text is:

Initial (default) values of all these attributes are cascaded to GLABs from their owning LAYE. All the above attributes are set directly, for example:

The character height and letter height attributes are discussed further in Miscellaneous Text Facilities.

CSPA and LSPA may be given negative values. For CSPA, small negative values (of the order of -.1) will cause text to become compressed (values much smaller than this are not useful). For LSPA, values of the order -.1 will compress lines; values of the order -3 will reverse the order of lines. (Limits are -10 to +10 for LSPA, -0.5 to +10 for CSPA.)

Figure 13:6 below illustrates the effects of varying the character spacing and line spacing.

Figure 13:6. Label Text - Character Spacing and Line Spacing

Text justification and vertical alignment are controlled by the settings of the JUST and ALIG attributes, which may have the following alternative settings:

Here, horizontal justification is relative to the Label origin, vertical alignment is relative to the text body - the area occupied by the text. The text base ignores text descenders (for example, the tail of a ‘p’ or a ‘y’).

Figure 13:7 below illustrates the effect of varying these attributes.

Figure 13:7. Horizontal Justification and Vertical Alignment

In Figure 13:8 below the symbol shows the text string origins for BBODY and BASE alignments. For a multi-line text string (as shown), the origin is at the baseline of the first line of text.

Figure 13:8. Text Base/Body Alignments

The Label FONT attribute controls the Label text font - see Miscellaneous Text Facilities for further information of text fonts.

The TXCOLOUR attribute controls the text colour - see Colors and Styles, for further information of style and colour settings.