Using Controls

The user interface contains standard Windows controls like buttons, scroll bars, list boxes, and pull-down lists. If you are unfamiliar with these term, refer to your Windows documentation. There are also a few unique controls that require some additional explanation.

Drop menus

Drop menu buttons are special buttons that cause a menu to pop-up when you press them. You can identify a drop menu button by the small black triangle in the lower right corner. Drop menus contain a number of selections to choose from. To make a selection, move the mouse over your choice and release, or just click on it.

Notice the ellipsis (three dots) at the lower right corner of the menu shown above. Some drop menus have these to indicate that there may be additional selections that are not shown. By selecting the ellipsis, you can access the complete list of selections with a dialog box.

Measurement Edit Boxes

Some edit boxes have special behaviors. When entering a measurement, you can type "3 in." to mean three inches, but you can also type "3.0 inches", or just "3"; all are equivalent. Your entries are always assumed to be in the current measurement units (inches or centimeters). If the field expects inches and you enter "3 ft." or "3 cm", it is treated as three inches. The same goes for point measurements for text size and line thicknesses. If a point measurement is called for, you can enter "2 pts" or "2 points" or "2.0", and so on.

Point measurements are a bit confusing at first. Just remember that there are 72 points in an inch or that most typed text is 10 or 12 points tall.

Standard sizes

It can be challenging to choose sizes for things that look good and print attractively. For example, if you are creating a connector with an arrowhead, should you make the arrowhead 8 points, 15 points, 6.3 points? Should its line width be 1/2 point of 2 points? It's hard to know without spending a lot of time trying different sizes AND printing them out. To greatly simplify choosing the sizes of some things, we've defined a set of standard sizes that you can select very easily. For example, arrowheads can be Small, Medium, or Large and line widths can be Fine, Medium, Heavy, or Very Heavy.

Standard sizes also make it possible to use menus as a well as edit boxes to choose sizes.

As you can see in this illustration, the border width for a figure can be adjusted by selecting a standard size with a menu, selecting a standard size with a drop menu, typing any size you want, or using a spin control to make it bigger or smaller.