Re: fill pattern

[Ethan M. <merritt@u.washington.edu>]

On Monday 28 August 2006 12:48 pm, Daniel J Sebald wrote:
>
> I'd say "blank" should not be a pattern.  Could it instead by a
> pattern of dots or circles?  (Dots would give more variety and be
> distinguishable from lines, even for small boxes.)

No. The maximal difference in fill patterns is the difference
between solid background and solid foreground; that is,
"empty" and "solid".   These should clearly be among the first few 
patterns provided.  After that it is not so obvious, but the
criss-cross hash pattern is probably the safest, so two different
densities of that are my preference for numbers #3 and #4.

Beyond that it's a losing battle.
Dots are particularly bad, however, unless you can scale them
up or down to match the printer resolution.  The default "dot"
on a high-resolution printer is effectively invisible.
Diagonal lines are also problematic, because they lead to 
odd visual effects.  Adjacent rectangles with opposite diagonal
fill give the optical illusion of leaning toward or away from
each other.

We don't have to invent this stuff from scratch, however.
There are many collections of fill patterns on the web, and
serious publications evaluating whether they are good or
bad. For example:
    portal.acm.org/ft_gateway.cfm?id=192438&type=pdf
    ieeexplore.ieee.org/iel2/1131/8046/00347511.pdf?arnumber=347511

Note that one school of thought says that fill patterns of any
sort are bad, and it is usually preferable to label the interior
of the area with a text or symbolic description of its contents.


-- 
Ethan A Merritt
Biomolecular Structure Center
University of Washington, Seattle WA