Apache OpenOffice Community Forum

Hi, I'm making a diagram with different colored lines between objects for easier readability. It helps, but what would really make it easy to read is if there was a way to get two toned striped lines so when two lines overlap you can still read my diagram. That a thing?

Greetings and welcome to the community forum!

If I understand what you want, then no, that's not a directly-supported feature. OOo Draw does offer partially transparent lines, so the two lines would overlap to produce some blended color, but not alternating colors.

Of course, you can always draw it yourself, but the methods I've tried get rather tedious. It wouldn't be worth it for general use, especially if the lines change--you'd have to re-draw the alternating lines from scratch.

One possibility that might be practical is to use a dashed line on top of a solid line: that should give you alternating colors.

Maybe someone else has a better idea?

Oh, it might also help if you could give us an example--or point to one somewhere--so we could see exactly what you want.

If the lines are only indicative rather than actual detail, you could run the two lines beside each other, much has acknak has shown in his middle example (without the dots). The lines could touch; in Coredraw one could put lines to one side or the other of a construction line. I don't know if this is possible in Draw, but it shouldn't be too difficult to position them so.

You can have two connectors between the same two glue points. Set them to different colours and the topmost to "dashed" line style like Acknak suggested. Play around with transparency to improve clarity in overlap/crossing situations.

The attached file is a simple demo. The continuous line is wider so you see which is which, but you can have both of equal width for a tidier look.

Pitfall with manual routing:
If you manually position the intermediate lines/curves of a connector, they will snap back to auto when you move one of the connected objects. You will have to reposition both connectors manually (if necessary). Connectors can be grouped, but that grouping has a flaw: Manual repositioning becomes a "box resize" which may break the connections to glue points.

Thanks guys, I got what I was looking for by overlapping two lines, the bottom layer being a dashed pattern