Drawing Text

Many of the MAPPLOT commands allow you to draw text on the map. Examples are annotations on a scale bar, titles in a title block or specifically located words and sentences. Text attributes include the font height (ht), width (wd), spacing (sp) and slant (sl). Text is drawn using the line colour and thickness of the entity's associated attributes.

Fonts are defined in a font file that has the name of the font and extensions .BFN or .GFN, for binary and ASCII representations respectively. Most fonts are proportionally spaced, in that each character uses a different width, and the gap between each character is a constant derived from the spacing parameter. The fonts included with the Geosoft system have been designed to look good when with an equal height, width and spacing. Refer to the FONT command for a figure of the available fonts.

MAPPLOT commands that draw text (including the text representation of numbers) allow you to specify the height, width, spacing, slant and font, usually on a sub-command line. If a font is not specified, the DEFAULT font is used, or the font named in the last FONT command.