3. Concepts
In order to take full advantage of Monodraw’s capabilities, it’s important to understand the core concepts involved.
3.1. Shapes
Shapes are the basic building block. A shape represents anything that provides some content on screen. For example, a box and a line are both shapes.
Furthermore, shapes form a tree, the so called shape tree. The tree defines the z-order of the shapes which affects how they are rendered on screen.
3.2. Attachment Points
Shapes can be dynamically attached to each other which makes it much easier to re-arrange diagrams while preserving any connections.
There are two entities: anchors and attachment points. Anchors can be attached to attachment points. Generally, positions of various shapes are defined in terms of an anchor which you can then attach to another shape and establish a connection.
3.3. Shape Content
Most shapes provide standard content, in addition to allowing you to draw custom content. For example, rectangular shapes can provide a border as standard content. Note that the custom content always appears on top of the standard.
You can edit the custom content of a shape by selecting Shape > Edit from the menu bar or pressing Command-E.
3.4. Blending
As the shape tree defines a rendering order, when shapes on top draw characters, they have to be combined with any characters that appear underneath. This process is called blending.
Any custom content is always blended as you would expect - it overwrites whatever is underneath.
On the other hand, standard content can be blended in a special way. For example, if you have a vertical line which intersects a horizontal line, the intersection point will be blended and displayed as a cross.
This behavior can be turned off a per-shape basis.