>If they were really taking least common denominator, then they wouldn't
>have implemented it at all.
>
>That said, if they wanted to make dashed lines work on a Mac, it's not as
>easy as saying PenSize(6,6) and doing the same thing. This is so because
>the pen that is used when drawing a line (with standard QuickDraw) is
>rectangular (or in this case, square), so if the dashed line were along a
>diagonal, it would look really bad.
>
>So if they wanted to improve the dash support to thicker lines and have it
>look right, then they'd have to deal with this problem by writing a
>separate line drawing routine (probably drawing them with polygons -- as if
>it wasn't slow enough as it is). The complexity mounts.
>
>And then, once they did this, they'd also have to add a feature like this
>to the Windows version of ODF so they would both have the same
>functionality.
>
>_troy
>
Even polygons aren't as bad as you imply. Usually however, it's a better tack to draw a single pixel broken line n times with appropriate offset. Same trick can be used for caps at the end. X Windows does this pretty well. Wouldn't it be nice to have a portable, thick dashed line library that does the right thing?