dashes

[josch]

There are some problems and inconsistencies with the docs. Here it says:

dashes (str) Causes lines to be dashed. A continuous line with no dashes is drawn with “[]0” or None. For (the rather complex) details on how to achieve dashing effects, see Adobe PDF References, page 217. Simple versions look like “[3 4]”, which means dashes of 3 and gaps of 4 pixels length follow each other. “[3 3]” and “[3]” do the same thing.

But when I write code like this:

shape = page.newShape()
shape.drawCircle(center, radius)
shape.finish(width=1, color=(0.5, 0.5, 0.5), dashes="[3]")
shape.commit()

then my printer will refuse to print a circle. It works fine without the dashes argument. In mupdf the dashed circle shows up fine. Another odd observation is, that ghostscript complains like this, when trying to process the pdf:

   **** Error reading a content stream. The page may be incomplete.
               Output may be incorrect.
   **** Error: File did not complete the page properly and may be damaged.
               Output may be incorrect.

I then went into the PDF ref page 217 and saw that all examples there had the phase at the end after the brackets. Funnily, when I rewrite my code like this:

shape = page.newShape()
shape.drawCircle(center, radius)
shape.finish(width=1, color=(0.5, 0.5, 0.5), dashes="[3] 0")
shape.commit()

Then there are no errors anymore. So maybe the examples in the documentation should be amended, like so:

Simple versions look like “[3 4] 0”, which means dashes of 3 and gaps of 4 pixels length follow each other. “[3 3] 0” and “[3] 0” do the same thing.

Thanks!

[JorjMcKie]

Thanks for reporting this - you are right. I had to learn the same lesson some time ago ... and forgot to update some places in the docu.
Dashes (apart from same thing in annotations!) must include the so-called phase, even if it is 0.

[JorjMcKie]

This issue is fixed with v1.18.0.