Creating Styled Lines

The stroke of any of the drawing tools (the Pen, Preset Shapes, and Text tools) can be drawn with styled lines rather than solid lines. To choose a line style, press the arrow for the selection box in a drawing tool's Tool Options palette and select the line style that you want:

You can also create your own custom styled lines. To create a styled line, press the arrow or preview window for Styled Lines on the Tool Options palette, then press the Custom button at the bottom on the Line Style selection list:

To begin creating a line style, press the Custom button on the Line Style selection list of the Pen, Preset Shapes, or Text tool. Pressing the line styles Custom button opens the Styled Lines dialog box:

Here, you can manipulate several line properties, including start and end caps for the entire line, segment start and end caps, and dashes and gaps.

To set one of the caps, press the arrow button near the cap's preview window to get the selection box shown below:

Choose the cap you want by clicking it. You can then set the size of the cap relative to the line width by pressing the cap's Size button and then setting the Height and Width for the cap.

You add dashes and gaps in the Style pane of the Styled Line dialog box:

The first time you press Add, you add a dash, which you can size by setting a value with the Length control or by dragging the pointed thumb in the control box. Press Add again, and you add a gap, which you can also size by setting a Length value or by dragging on its thumb. You can keep adding dashes and gaps. To resize a particular dash or gap, click its thumb and then make your adjustment or set a value directly in the Length control.

As an example, let's try the following settings:

First cap and Last cap set to Tulip, each with Size set to 5.00 x 5.00
Different segment caps checked, with Segment start cap and Segment end cap both set to Pineapple, each with Size set to 2.00 x 2.00
A Dash set to 40 and a Gap set to 25

A preview of the resulting line is shown in the preview window at the bottom of the dialog box. Here are the settings and preview for the example:

To save your styled line, press Save As New and enter a name when prompted to enter a Styled Line Name. If you want to overwrite an existing styled line, enter the same name as the existing line. If you want to create a new styled line without overwriting any existing line, be sure to enter a unique name for your new styled line. (Paint Shop Pro will warn you if you try to give the new styled line the same name as an existing styled line.)

Note: Styled lines supplied with Paint Shop Pro are Read Only files so that they cannot be accidentally overwritten.

Once you save your new line style, it's available with any drawing tool. You can create styled lines for all sorts of purposes, including navigation buttons for a Web site or separator bars for a Web site or newsletter.