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### 8.6 Common Attributes

Attributes can influence how chart elements look like and how they are placed. There is a set of attributes that apply to several types of elements, so we describe them collectively here.

Attribute names are case-insensitive. Attributes can take string, number or boolean values. String values shall be quoted in double quotes (‘`"`’) if they contain non-literal characters or spaces41. Quoted strings themselves can contain quotation marks by preceeding them with a backslash, like ‘`\"`’. Numeric values can, in general be floating point numbers (no exponents, though), but for some attributes these are rounded to integers. Boolean values can be specified via `yes` or `no`. The syntax of color attributes is explained in Specifying Colors.

The attributes below can be part of a style, see Styles.

#### Footnotes

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Specifically for signalling charts and block diagrams: strings that contain characters other than letters, numbers, underscores or dots, must be quoted. If the string starts with a number or a dot or it it ends with a dot, it must also be quoted. The only exception to this are built-in style names, see Defining Styles or color definitions containing commas and + or - signs, see Specifying Colors. For graphviz graphs strings can not start with number and can only contain alphanumeric characters - else they have to be quoted.