When preparing figures for an article or for a presentation, it
is often necessary to add text, arrows, etc. to the figure. This can
be done with most image processing programs and also with common
presentation programs, but often it is more convenient to have such
functionality present in the post-processor itself. In view of this,
two simple objects are available in
baspl++, the Text
and the Line object.
These objects are of 2-dimensional nature, as they work with
Scene coordinates. Scene
coordinates have values of (0, 0) in the lower left corner and values
of (1, 1) in the upper right corner. Thus, the
Text and the Line
objects are independent of any Part
orientation.
Both objects have comprehensive on-line documentation, type
>>> help(Text) >>> help(Line)
Also, both objects have a graphical user interface by which all settings and parameters can be inspected and changed.
This object is capable of displaying text over multiple lines. The lines can be left-justified, centered (default), or right-justified. The whole text can be vertically aligned at top, at bottom, or centered. The font (both proportional and monospace fonts are supported) and the colour can be chosen as well.
The Text object is not a replacement for
a word processor; it is rather meant as a simple means to annotate
graphical data. It does not break the lines automatically (line breaks
must be specified by the user), and it supports only one font and one
colour for the whole text (of course, different
Text objects can use different fonts and
different colours).
The best way to use Text objects is to
create and edit them with the GUI. When everything looks fine,
create_script()
will dump all Python commands necessary to reproduce the current display. For example (the text is displayed at the upper left corner):
t = Text('ABCDabcd 123', (0.00, 1.00), halign='left', valign='top')
The Text object's editor contains a large area
where the text can be entered. When done, the "Update" button must be
clicked.
With the Line object, straight lines and
single- or double-ended arrows can be drawn. The start and end
positions, the width, the colour, the arrow type, and the tip size of
the arrows can be set. The Line object is
created in the same way as shown for the Text
object in the previous section. The most intuitive way is to adjust
the line start and end position by means of the GUI, and then calling
create_script()
which will dump all Python commands necessary to reproduce the current display:
l = Line((0.60, 0.76), (0.60, 0.63), arrowtype='end')
