Upside down compared to mathematical convention, but not to GUI
convention (the coordinate systems for all GUI systems except OS/2 PM
have 0,0 in the upper left corner, and the HyperCard/MetaCard
coordinate system follows this convention).
> If you use a
> markerPattern you have a tiled sheet behind these holes in the fabric that
> show through.
This is one way of looking at it. Another way is that when you set the
markerPattern, you're just drawing markers with a textured "pen"
instead of using a pen of a solid color.
> Apparently the idea of using an image as a marker was a
> misconception. The marker color and the marker fill color can be
> established from the marker level of the graphic dialog box. If you keep
> the line width at 1 or 2, you can create little icons that appear at the
> points of the polygon. You can define closed, disconnected areas inside
> the outer perimeter of the marker by leaving a gap in the pointers, but I
> found no obvious way to keep the markerFill out of these internal areas.
> The markers don't scale as you scale the graphic itself. If you wanted to
> scale markers, I guess you would need to modify the markerPoints.
The origin of all the patterns is the origin of the window (0,0), so
you can't really use the patterns to draw images at each of the points
of a graphic (unless the points all happen to fall on a grid the size
of the pattern). What you want is a "markerIcon" property, which I
can see could be very useful for some types of figures (maps comes to
mind). Setting the markerIcon to an image id would cause the graphic
to draw that icon centered on each of the points of the graphic. This
would be a very efficient way to display a particular icon at a large
number points (e.g., one for each airport or campground on a state
map). The only way to do this now would be to use a whole bunch of
buttons (slow) or restrict your symbols to simple single-color
geometric shapes (by setting the markerpoints).
I'll put a "markerIcon" property on the feature-request list for 2.0.
Scott
> Sincerely,
>
> Clark P
-- *********************************************************************** * Scott Raney 303-447-3936 Remember: the better you look, * * raney@metacard.com the more you'll see -- Lidia * ***********************************************************************