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The purpose of a label is to add some textual description to the Work Flow. To add a label to the Work Flow, you need to select the Add Label tool from the toolbar, and then you can simply move the mouse pointer to the position in the canvas where you want to drop the label, and press the left mouse button. Once you do so, a new label is dropped in to the canvas. If you want to add several labels, just keep the Ctrl key pressed while pressing the left mouse button.
Moving a labels is very simple: place the mouse cursor over it, and when the mouse pointer turns into two double arrows press the left mouse button and start dragging the label around. If the current selection involves other elements, those will move too. The minimum distance by which you can move a label is determined by the coarseness of the grid, which is part of the settings for the Work Flow default properties (see Section 4.2.5, "General properties").
The appearance of a label can be affected in several ways. You can change the text and the background color, the orientation, the font size and style, the the dimension of the label frame (a rectangular area around the label that is filled with the label background color), and the width of the line surrounding the label. All of these operations can be performed through the label properties panel. To display this panel you need to select the label you wish to customize, and then select the Show/Hide Properties icon (the right-most icon on the Work Flow toolbar). If only the panel title is visible, just click on the triangle that precedes it, and the panel will appear.
The first control in the label properties panel allows you to modify the label's textual content. Next, there are controls that let you to select a color for the label text (or foreground) and background. To select a color you need to click on the color preview button, and you can then use the color chooser to select the desired color (see Section C.1, "Color Chooser"). Note that foreground color also affects the color of the line surrounding the label.
The Orientation controls let you select the desired orientation for the label. Legal orientations are left to right, top to bottom, and bottom to top.
With the Font control you can impose the font family, style and size used for the label.
With the Frame Width and Frame Height selectors you can determine the overall size of the frame that surrounds the label. You can specify independently the frame width and height.
Finally, with the Line Width control you can specify the size of the line surrounding the label.
All the default values for the above properties will depend on the default properties for the current Work Flow project (see Section 4.2.5, "Labels properties").
So far we have described how to change the appearance of a single label. Acting on a set of labels is very similar. All you need to do is select the labels you want to act on, and display the Label Properties panel. When multiple labels are selected, each control for which the label values differ presents the text <Different values>. Every action on the controls will affect all the involved labels.
For removing a label or a set of selected labels from the Work Flow, first you must select the interested labels, then you can:
Cutting all the selected items by pressing Ctrl-X. In an equivalent way, you can select the Cut actions from the , from the main toolbar or from the canvas contextual menu.
Deleting all the selected items by pressing Delete. In an equivalent way, you can select the Delete actions from the , from the main toolbar or from the canvas contextual menu.
Deleting only the selected labels by selecting the Remove Selected Labels item from the canvas contextual menu.
Deleting the selected label by selecting the Remove Label item from the label contextual menu.
