Notes and Comments

The ‘note’, ‘comment’ and ‘endnote’ commands enable you to make annotations to the chart that are visible to the reader. Notes are placed onto the chart drawing area in a callout; comments are placed onto a column left or right from the chart; whereas endnotes are placed at the bottom of the chart. Notes are suitable for shorter comments, whereas the latter two fit longer explanations better.

Each note, commend and endnote has a target element. The target element is the element preceeding the ‘note’, ‘comment’ or ‘endnote’ command[23]. In case of notes the tip of the callout will point to the target element, whereas side notes will be typeset beside their target. You can issue multiple notes, comments and/or endnotes to the same target. If numbering is enabled for a note, comment or endnote, it inherits the numbering of its target (if any).

The syntax is simple, issue one of the three commands with attributes. You must specify a label, but similar to arrows or entities, the colon syntax can be used. 

note: This is a note [attributes];
note at <tip>: Note pointing to <tip> [attribute];
comment: Comment text [attributes];
endnote: Endnote text [attribuest];

Note and comment text is typeset in a smaller font by default. You can change both of the above by changing the ‘note’, ‘comment’ or ‘comment’ styles.

Notes

For notes the tip of the callout can be guided using the at keyword. After it you can spacify either an entity or a marker. This is useful if you want to make a note to a specific part of an arrow.

You can use the note.pointer attribute to define, what the tip looks like. It can take four values: none, callout, arrow or blockarrow.

The position of the note is selected automatically by Msc-generator, but you can influence the choice via the note.pos attribute. It can take one of the following values: near, far, left, right, up, down, left_up, left_down, right_up or right_down. The first two can be used to specify the distance from the element, whereas the rest dictate which direction the note shall be. You can set this attribute twice if needed, once for distance and a second time for direction.

The ‘note’ style contains text, fill and line attirbutes and also ‘note.layout’ and ‘note.pos’ to define default note layout.

Comments and Endnotes

Comments can be set either to the left or the right side of the chart as dictated by the side attribute. This attribute can also take the value end, which will turn the comment to an endnote. In fact endnotes are comments with their side attribute set to end. So you can convert all your comments to endnotes by redefining the side attribute of the ‘comment’ style, as below. For ease of use the comment.text and the comment.side chart options can also be used to set comment properties[24]. 

defstyle note [text.size.normal=16, text.size.small=10];
defstyle comment [side=end];
comment.side=right;
comment.text.italics=yes;

When the chart contains comments on the side a line is drawn separating the comments from the chart text. You can change the properties of this line via the ‘comment.line.*’ chart options. Only the width, color and type of the line can be changed (not its radius or corner). You can turn this line off by selecting the ‘none’ line type. Similar, the background of the comments can be set via the ‘comment.fill.*’ chart options. These options can also be made part of designs. Finally, the space available on the side for comments can be adjusted with the hspace left|right comment command, see Spacing.


[23] Note that some elements cannot be targets, such as chart options. In this case the preceeding element becomes the target.

[24] These are equivalent to changing the ‘comment’ style. There is no such shortcut for endnotes, yet.