Display Attributes

Briefly

These control the appearance of cases in your collection.

By default, the collection is an array of gold balls labeled, "a case." But you can change that. Every case has display attributes whose values determine its appearance in the collection. You can control those values with formulas.

You get access to display attributes through the Display tab in the inspector. Here they are:

x

The horizontal coordinate of the center of the case's icon. This is measured in pixels, starting at the left edge of the collection object and increasing to the right.

y

The vertical coordinate of the center of the case's icon. This is measured in pixels, starting at the top of the collection object and increasing downward.

image

The icon representing the case. More about image icons.

width

The width of the case in pixels.

height

The height of the case in pixels.

caption

The text associated with the case. More about captions.

Why bother?

While you can represent data using Fathom's graphs, an open collection lets you design your own data representation. Some of the example documents on the hard disk (Sample Documents>Fathom Demos>Data Display and Exploration folder) demonstrate this, notably:

These two use position, for example, converting latitude and longitude into x and y. But you can also represent other aspects of data; you can convert any attribute's values into some display attribute--icon, height, width, and so on. While some of these representations look like a jumble, some may help you see patterns in the data you otherwise would have missed.