English Language & Usage Stack Exchange is a question and answer site for linguists, etymologists, and serious English language enthusiasts. It only takes a minute to sign up.
Sign up to join this community
I am writing a scientific article and I need to describe the two hatched areas in the Figure below. How do you call these? Upward hatching and downward hatching? Or what?
E.g.
The upward hatching corresponds to newly captured individuals, the downward hatching to the recaptured ones.
Upward and downward do not differentiate between the two hatch pattern shown. Both patterns can be seen as going upward -- one slanting left and one slanting right from the bottom of the hatch line to the top.
It's usually not necessary to describe a graphical identifier; it can become too cumbersome and prone to confusion. That's why charts have legends that tie a graphical device to a text explanation. If this hatch //// represents newly captured individuals, the legend would show that, and then in the text you just refer to the description, not the graphical identifier.
As mentioned in a comment, you can also refer to areas of the chart by calling them the area above and below the data line.
There are many reference works about informational graphics; some Internet searching will give you some basic guidelines and things to avoid.
Your problem is that you don't have a key/legend for the graphic, which would eliminate the need for your entire sentence.
If it's not possible to add a key, you should take the time, space, and words to explain it clearly. Spell it out, as in this passage about art:
Right-handed artists will tend to create hatching lines from the bottom left to the top right, while left-handed artists will hatch from the top left to the bottom right.
This is universally clear, even to people whose native language is written right to left, where terms like "upwards" or "left" might be especially confusing. In fact, I would say that native speakers are liable to confuse terms like those if they haven't seen them applied to describe this type of pattern before.
For your simple graphic, you could also refer to the top and bottom regions, though this obviously does not describe the hatching.
The expert here is Illustrator, the drawing program.
Creating a Seamless Diagonal Pattern in Illustrator Seamless means the pattern is continuous without any break or obstacle (also called a repeating pattern or tileable pattern). Many beginners struggle to create seamless diagonal or other such patterns that cannot be created manually. But once you know how to do it, this approach can be very useful in your design or illustration work
aka diagonal line pattern
How To: Create a Seamless Diagonal Line Pattern in Illustrator
By Brant Wilson Published March 17, 2023
You basically have to go and use the program to change the pattern or rotate it to get the pattern in the direction you want. Diagonal left or diagonal right.
Oracle also use the term left and right:
Section - 2 : Diagonal Left and Diagonal Right Shading patterns
One text says: The 12.6.0 output reversed that, so that the diagonal left [line] pattern was printed as diagonal right. This was an Oracle fix for the diagonal left and right came out correctly.
