Microsoft® Office Visio® 2003 Inside Out

Creating Your Own Line and Fill Patterns

If you want to use a fill pattern, line pattern, or line end not available in Visio, you can create your own. Custom patterns are powerful and peculiar. They work roughly like this: you create a shape and tell Visio to use it as a fill pattern, line pattern, or line end. You specify the attributes you want, and then Visio adds your pattern as an option in the Fill or Line dialog box. You can then apply the pattern to a shape in the usual way.

Understanding Pattern Philosophy

The pattern you design is a simple shape or group, as Figure 23-11 shows. The options you set for your pattern determine the way it looks when applied to a shape. The results can be dramatically different, as Figure 23-12 shows.

Figure 23-11. To ...