8.6 Common Attributes

Attributes can influence how chart elements look like and how they are placed. There is a set of attributes that apply to several types of elements, so we describe them collectively here.

Attribute names are case-insensitive. Attributes can take string, number or boolean values. String values shall be quoted in double quotes (‘"’) if they contain non-literal characters or spaces39. Quoted strings themselves can contain quotation marks by preceeding them with a backslash, like ‘\"’. Numeric values can, in general be floating point numbers (no exponents, though), but for some attributes these are rounded to integers. Boolean values can be specified via yes or no. The syntax of color attributes is explained in Specifying Colors.

The attributes below can be part of a style, see Styles.


Footnotes

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Specifically for signalling charts and block diagrams: strings that contain characters other than letters, numbers, underscores or dots, must be quoted. If the string starts with a number or a dot or it it ends with a dot, it must also be quoted. The only exception to this are built-in style names, see Defining Styles or color definitions containing commas and + or - signs, see Specifying Colors. For graphviz graphs strings can not start with number and can only contain alphanumeric characters - else they have to be quoted.