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3. Basics of PhotoLine

## 3.8 The Line Style Editor

The Line Style Editor controls the appearance of lines. It has two subdialogs.

The Line Style Subdialog

The Line Style subdialog contains the basic properties of line styles.

The most common property is the Width. This value adjusts the thickness of a line. 0 represents a hair line. A hair line is - regardless of the current magnification - always exactly 1 pixel wide.

Using Pattern you have access to a predefined list of line patterns. You can edit this list via the Line Pattern subdialog.

Line Join defines how the strokes of a line are joined. You can choose between "pointed", "round" and "flat".

Alignment has an effect only when applied to closed vector paths. In this situation it can be set whether the line is on, inside or outside of the vector path.

The appearance of the line ends is controlled by Line Start and Line End. It can be square, round, square with offset and arrow. If you choose the arrow, you can change its Width and Length relative to the line width.

Often required line styles can be dragged to the list field at the bottom of the dialog. They can be reused by a simple mouse-click. This list field can be accessed via the Line Style List (see chapter 4.21) and the drop-down list of line style fields.

The Line Pattern Subdialog

The Line Pattern subdialog allows you to set advanced properties of a line style. All settings are relative to the line width, that was set in the Line Style subdialog.

Using Variable Width you can create a line style with a non-uniform width. The width of the curve field corresponds to the length of the vector path, the height corresponds to the line width. The two small triangles on the right side set the minimum and maximum line width.

Pattern lets you define your own line patterns. The values for strokes and gaps are set alternately. If you are activating the alignment icon , the pattern will be scaled so that it fits between two corner points of your vector graphic.

Offset defines the start of the pattern. If you have a pattern with the widths "2 2" and use an offset value of 1, the pattern will start in the middle of the first stroke.