ENTRY Statements: Additional Control

Features Available for ENTRY Text

ENTRY statements are more flexible than ENTRYTITLE or ENTRYFOOTNOTE statements and support additional features for automatically positioning text, aligning text vertically, and rotating text:

AUTOALIGN= NONE | AUTO | (location-list)

Specifies whether the entry is automatically aligned within its parent when nested within an overlay-type layout.

ROTATE= 0 | 90 | 180 | 270

Specifies the angle of text rotation.

VALIGN= CENTER | TOP | BOTTOM

Specifies the vertical alignment of the text.

Positioning ENTRY Text

By default, any ENTRY statement that is defined within a 2-D overlay-type layout and does not specify a location is placed in the center of the graph wall (HALIGN=CENTER VALIGN=CENTER).

If you know where you want to place the text, one way to position it is to use the HALIGN= and VALIGN= options, as shown in the following example:

layout overlay;
  scatterplot x=height y=weight;
  entry halign=left "NOBS = 19" /
        valign=top border=true;
endlayout;

Using HALIGN= and VALIGN= to Position ENTRY Text

Whenever you add text within the graph wall, you have to consider the possibility that the text might appear on top of or behind data markers and plot lines. For this reason, you should consider using the AUTOALIGN= option rather than the HALIGN= and VALIGN= options for positioning the text.

The AUTOALIGN= option enables you to set a priority list that restricts the entry location to certain locations. The priority list can include any of the keywords TOPLEFT, TOP, TOPRIGHT, LEFT, CENTER, RIGHT, BOTTOMLEFT, BOTTOM, and BOTTOMRIGHT.

In the following histogram, we know that the best location for an entry is either TOPLEFT or TOPRIGHT, depending on the skewness of the data. With the following coding, if the data were skewed to the right so the entry text overlaps with the histogram, the text would automatically appear at TOPLEFT.

layout overlay;
  histogram weight;
  entry  "NOBS = 19" /
    autoalign=(topright topleft)
    border=true;
endlayout;

When the parent layout contains only scatter plots, the ENTRY statement can use the AUTOALIGN=AUTO setting to automatically position the text where it is the farthest away from any scatter points. In all cases, even one like the following example where many positions are available that might minimize data collision, the AUTO specification selects the position for you and you have no further control over the text position.

layout overlay;
  scatterplot x=height y=weight;
  entry halign=left "NOBS = 19" /
        autoalign=auto border=true;
endlayout;

Rotating ENTRY Text

ENTRY statements can appear in most layout types. For example, ENTRY statements can be used to define the text that appears in a CELLHEADER block in a LATTICE layout. You can also use ENTRY statements in SIDEBAR, ROWHEADERS, and COLUMNHEADERS blocks.

In the following example, the ROWHEADERS block shows how to define rotated row headers for a lattice layout. The complete code for this example is shown in Defining a Lattice with Additional Features.

   rowheaders;
     layout gridded / columns=2;
       entry "Volume" / textattrs=GraphLabelText rotate=90 ;
       entry "(Millions of Shares)" / textattrs=GraphValueText rotate=90 ;
     endlayout;
     layout gridded / columns=2;
       entry "Price" / textattrs=GraphLabelText rotate=90 ;
       entry "(Adjusted Close)" / textattrs=GraphValueText rotate=90 ;
     endlayout;
  endrowheaders;

Lattice with Rotated Text in Row Headers