|  |  | 3.5 Pen, dash style, arrows, and tiling patterns

## 3.5 Pen, dash style, arrows, and tiling patterns

The path properties field is used to set all properties of path objects except for the pen width, which is set using the selector just above the path properties field. The dash-dot pattern (solid line, dashed, dotted etc.) effect for the boundaries of path objects, such as polygons and polygonal lines, splines, circles and ellipses, rectangles and circular arcs. It does not effect text or marks.

Line width is given in Postscript points (1/72 inch). A good value is something around 0.4 or 0.6.1

By clicking near the ends of the segment shown in the path properties field, you can toggle the front and rear arrows. Only polygonal lines, splines, and circular arcs can have arrows.

If you draw a single line segment with arrows and set it to "filled only", then the arrows will be drawn using the fill color (instead of the stroke color), and the segment is not drawn at all. This is sometimes useful to place arrows that do not appear at the end of a curve.

Various shapes and sizes of arrows are available through the context menu in the path properties field. You can add other shapes and sizes using a stylesheet.

The arrow shapes arc and farc are special. When the final segment of a path object is a circular arc, then these arcs take on a curved shape that depends on the radius of the arc. They are designed to look right even for arcs with rather small radius.

A tiling pattern allows you to hatch a path object instead of filling it with a solid color. Only path objects can be filled with a tiling pattern. The pattern defines the slope, thickness, and density of the hatching lines, their color is taken from the object's fill color. You can select a tiling pattern using the context menu in the path properties field. You can define your own tiling patterns in the documents stylesheet.