Folk, I've been working on another Vinci drawing and thinking about a better way to handle dimensioning. A general objective is to size the font and line widths independently of the drawing scale. Why? Well, suppose you make a drawing at a 1:1 scale for A4 paper. Later you begin a new drawing at 1:100 scale for A4 paper. The original drawing might serve as a template for the new drawing but the lettering in the dimensions and the line widths of the new drawing should not be 1/100 the size of the lettering and line widths in the original. In fact, lettering and lines widths on the new drawing are best about the same as on the original. So how can this be achieved? Would be convenient to define globally a graphics state or environment for font size and line width, which can be retained independent of changes incurred as the drawing is built. After drawing a feature, one could temporarily drop into a "dimensioning mode", apply a dimension and then return to the "drawing mode". To find a way to do this I reread Vinci.Text, The Graphical Description Language Vinci. These questions remain. -- What exactly is an environment? -- Which of the statements invokes a new environment nested "within the current environment"? (Quoting the manual.) -- What is a graphics state? -- Is there always just one CTM which changes as the environment changes or does each environment have a CTM? -- What is the structure of the CTM? How is it applied to a graphical vector? Eg. [[Sx 0 Tx] [0 Sy Ty]] . [Vx Vy 1]^T =? [SxVx+Tx SyVy+Ty]^T There are two motivations for mentioning these topics. In the short term I can hope that someone else can shed some light. In the long term my questions might motivate better documentation in future work. Apart from this I need to study the vast source code. Regards, ... Peter E. Desktops.OpenDoc http://carnot.pathology.ubc.ca/