Width Control

This chapter provides details on how to use the Width control to control the width attribute on paths and height attribute on text. You can use the Width control to specify the width of primitive shapes that have the width attribute.

The width attribute defines the thickness of certain shapes. Paths are the only shape with width supported by the Graphical Cell Compiler at this time. Since the width attribute is not affected by other controls (like Stretch) the Width control provides the only access to change it.

While text does not have width (in the sense that paths do), the text height attribute is basically the same concept and is also supported by the Width control. This means that one can use the Width control to make absolute or relative changes to text height.

Width Change

The Width Change parameter defines how you wish to apply the specified width to the selected shape. If Absolute is selected, then all shapes associated with this control are set to the specified value, ignoring the value they were created with.

If Relative is selected, then the specified value is added to the currently-defined shape's attribute.
Again, this applies to width for paths and height for text. The illustration shows the differences between Absolute and Relative width changes.

Width

This parameter specifies the actual value the shapes are to be set to Absolute or modified by Relative.
The results of the Width equation can be negative. This could make sense if the initial shape had a specific value which needed to be reduced as part of the execution of the PAM. But when all the width controls are done, the value being assigned to any specific shape must be positive. A negative value is not allowed. The compiled macro forces this condition by taking the computed width and operating on it with the max2() AEL function. For paths the function is:

de_set_path_width(max2(computed_width, 0.0));

This way if the computed width happens to be negative, the value of 0.0 is used instead.

This further implies that if one is having trouble with shapes being generated with zero width, make sure the width calculations are not going negative.

Since the width/height parameter is associated with, but still separate from, a given shape (or shapes) it's value as modified by the Width control is independent of any other actions performed on the shape (such as, stretch, repeat, etc.). This also implies that if a shape is copied (by a Repeat or Polar control) that all the resulting shapes have the same width/height. And since the value applies to all copies of a given shape it doesn't matter whether the Width control is executed before or after a copy control.