In EmphaSign, an object is positioned
in the composition by specifying reference points on its geometry,
then defining the relationships between this object and reference
points on other objects.
An object is oriented and resized by
specifying fixed values or by referencing rotation and size values
of other objects. And because obects can be oriented such that
their sides are no longer aligned with the axes of the composition,
it is possible to reference either the object-oriented or
axis-oriented geometry of an object for position and size
references.
In order to maintain whitespace, an
object can have margins specified on the inside and outside of its
geometry. When the data changes from one data row to another, the
margins change also, based on the shape of the actual data.
These shapes can be of a fidelity that
is as low or high as is needed to achieve the desired layout. For
example, the shape of a glyph object could be its simple bounding
box, the shape of a band stretched around its contents, or even the
actual glyph outlines themselves.
To vary the visual layout of a template
based on contents of source data, alternate objects can perform
decisions at run-time based on patterns in the data or geometric
properties of its objects. In the following example, three
different pricing block layouts are generated based solely on the
content of a single field of data. These kinds of decisions allows
very sophisticated, hands-off file processing.
Graphical data output is accomplished
through the industry standard PDF file format. Rich layout features
such as ligatures and transparency are fully supported, as is font
embedding and output of glyphs as outlines for maximum
compatibility across Mac, Windows and UNIX platforms.
