Text labels

Kig allows you to add text labels to a construction. This is very useful for showing names, explanations or other text in constructions. Kig can also display variable information about objects (also known as “properties”).

To start constructing a text label, simply press the Text Label button in the Kig toolbar or select Objects->Other ->Text label in the menubar.

Next, you have to choose a location for the text label. You can either just select a random location on the screen, or choose to “attach” the label to another object.


Attaching a label to a circle...

You now reach the text label dialog. Here, you can type in the text that you want to show in the new label, and click Finish. The label should now be present on your document.


The Text Label Dialog

The previous example was a simple one, and limited to just text. However, there is also support for showing variable information about objects in a label (e.g. you can construct a label showing the text “This segment is %1 units long.” where %1 would be dynamically replaced with the length of a specific segment).

To do this, enter a text with a number of placeholders ( %1, %2 etc.) in it. When you are finished, press the Next button to continue. If you want to change the text or variables later, you can go back using the Back button.

The wizard now shows the text you entered with all placeholders replaced by something like argument 1. Selecting what to show as a certain argument is done by first clicking the argument in question. Then click on the object about which you want to show information, and then select an interesting piece of information in the popup menu that appears. For instance, in the example above, you would click argument 1, click on the correct segment in the main Kig window, and select the property Length. Afterwards, you can fill in the rest of the variable parts, or select another property for one of the variable parts if you wish to change it. When you are ready, click the Finish button to complete the construction of the text label.


Selecting a property for a variable part