Version 14 of Hatch Patterns

Updated 2011-11-21 13:24:20 by VH

Hatch patterns are commonly used in graphics software to highlight distinct areas of a map or drawing. There are three general techniques for filling in polygonal areas on a software canvas:

  • flood with a single defined colour - currently this method is supported by the Tk canvas.
  • fill with tiled raster image (the wiki page discussing bitmap indicates that this is possible in tk also) and
  • fill with repeated vector pattern

This page is dedicated to the discussion of the repeated vector pattern.

Official http://docs.autodesk.com/ACD/2010/ENU/AutoCAD%202010%20User%20documentation/index.html?url=WS73099cc142f4875513fb5cd10c4aa30d6b-7e57.htm,topicNumber=d0e368209%|%documentation%|% from the Autodesk website for the popular commercial hatch definition format.

Hatch pattern definitions are defined in ASCII text .pat file. There are many free definition files available at various places (here , for example) around the web, though there doesn't seem to be any truly "open source" .pat files available.

Examples of hatch patterns, rendered with tcl and pdf4tcl .

Category GUICategory Graphics