Texts and Tables

With CindyScript you can produce controlled and styled text for a drawing. The essential functionality is covered by the drawtext operator. Furthermore, with drawtable a table output can be generated. Using texts and tables in scripts is very useful, since one can use the script language to control when and where text is displayed in a construction. This is a very important tool for providing explanatory texts and functional exercises that react to input.

Drawing Text: drawtext(<vec>,<expr>)¶

Description: The drawtext(<vec>,<string>) operator plots a text <string> at a specified position that is given by the position vector <vec>. This position vector can be given either in Euclidean xy-coordinates or in homogeneous coordinates.

Example: The line drawtext(``(0,0),"Hello World") prints the string "Hello World" with lower left corner at the position (0, 0).

Modifiers: The drawtext operator supports several operators for the modification of appearance and position.

Besides the available font families also the three strings serif, sansserif and monospaced are allowed, that always produce corresponding standard font types.

Example: The code

x=1..10;
forall(x,i,
  drawtext((i,0),"Text",
  size->2*i+15,
  bold->true,
  color->(1-i/10,0,i/10`


![](../assets/wiki_up/TextX.png)
)

produces the picture below.

If the string expression contains a chacracter then this line-break is literally interpreted. By this it is easy to produce multilined text, as the following piece of code shows.

drawtext`0,0),size->18,
"In Cinderella 'newlines' in Text
are really used as line terminators.
So this text will appear as a
multilined text.")

Available font families: fontfamilies()¶

Description: This operator produces a list of all font families that are available on your computer. Usually this will be quite a lot. The following piece of code displays the names of some of these font families in their own font style.

families=fontfamilies();
i=0;
while(length(families)>i,i=i+1;
   drawtext((mod(i,5)*7,round(i/5)),families_i,family->families_i);
)

Unicode Characters: unicode(<string>)¶

Description: Cinderella can display any Unicode Character in text strings. To access a unicode character the statement unicode(<string>) accepts a unicode description (a number) given as a string of digits. It returns a string with the corresponding unicode character. By default the base of the unicode description is 16. So hexadecimal descriptions are usually accepted as input. The base can be changed by a modifier.

The base of the unicode description can be changed with the base modifier.

Example: Both unicode("0041") and unicode("65",base->10) produce the character "A".

Test whether a string can be displayed: candisplay(<string>)¶

Description: This operator tests, whether a given string can be displayed in the currently chosen font. It returns a boolean value.

Drawing tables: drawtable(<vec>,<list>)¶

One- and two-dimensional lists can be easily drawn in a geometric view as tables. In the simplest form one has only to provide the list and a position where the table should be drawn. Modifiers can be used to fine tune the appearance of the table.

Example: The following code produces the picture below:

x=1..10;
table=apply(x,(#,#^2,#^3,#^4`;
drawtable`0,0),table);

Modifiers: The drawtable operator supports several modifiers to control the graphical appearance of the table. A summary of the modifiers is given in the following table:

Example: The following code is a more elaborate example using the drawtable operator. modifiers are used to create a nice appearance of the tables. A second table is used to create a heading for the table.

x=1..9;
tab=apply(x,(#,#^2,#^3,#^4));
tab1=("x","$x^2$","$x^3$","$x^4$");
linecolor((0,0,.8`;
drawtable`0,0),tab,
  width->50,
  height->22,
  back->(1,0,0),
  backalpha->0.1,


![](../assets/wiki_up/Table1X.png)
  align->"right",
  size->12
);
linecolor((0,0,0`;
drawtable`0,8.1),tab1,flip->true,
  width->50,
  height->33,
  back->(0,0,1),
  backalpha->0.4,
  align->"mid",
  size->16,
  color->(1,1,1)
);