IDF may be used to draw lines and shapes on the page. Furthermore, EscapeE may use the rectangular area occupied by a drawn path as a field tag (see 'To set up tags' topic).

Lines may be made up of one or more straight segments, curved segments or a sequence of straight and curved segments. To position the pen at the start of a new line, use the Move element <M>.

To draw a straight line to another point, simply define that position as a Polyline element <P>.

To draw a curved line to another point, however, three pairs of coordinates must be defined so that a "Bezier" curve may be calculated. The first two points are not positioned on the curve itself: they are "control" points which bend the line so that it passes through the third pair of coordinates: see Bezier element <B>.

The SHAPE attribute may be used to construct regular shapes (BOX, ELLIPSE and filled RECTANGLE) from the dimensions of the element (GROUP, PAGE etc.) that contains it.

---