The position of an item is given relative to the origin (the top-left corner) of the 'container' (e.g. GROUP) it is in. The size of an item defaults to the dimensions of the container.

Positioning

To specify a horizontal distance of an element from the left side of its container, use the LEFT (or X) attribute.

To specify a vertical distance of an element down from the top of its container, use the TOP (or Y) attribute.

To specify that the current cursor position (i.e. as left by the previous piece of text or bottom-right corner of the previous group) is used, set X="X" or Y="Y". This is useful for stacking elements such that they are placed one after the other on the page (e.g. in a row, column or table).

To force an element to the edge of its container, use the ALIGN attribute. Text may be justified or be baseline aligned too.

Sizing

Use WIDTH and HEIGHT attributes to specify the size of an item: the values can be full arithmetic expressions including brackets. You may also use the following special symbols:

_PRINTABLE gives the printable area of the page. e.g. _PRINTABLE.LEFT is the leftmost printable point.

_PAGE gives the full page dimensions e.g. _PAGE.WIDTH is the width of the paper.

Alternatively, an element's size may be supplied by a FIELD element. A FIELD element may originate from an existing EscapeE field definitions (".EE") file or from an IDF statement: see DEFINE attribute. A field sourced from an EscapeE .EE file may be resized using the BOUNDS attribute.

Examples

<PAGE BOUNDS="_PRINTABLE">

sets the page-boundaries to the printable area of the page.

<FILE FILENAME="Logo1.tif" LEFT = "WIDTH/2"/>

would be used to position the file Logo1.tif on the right of a two-up page.

Tip:  usually, a leading underscore is used to distinguish special fields from user-defined fields. If there is no user-defined field with the same name then the underscore may omitted.

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