ACUCOBOL-GT uses line and column positions to specify the location of graphical objects. There are two reasons for this:
1. The line and column notation is already familiar to COBOL programmers.
2. Retaining this notation makes translating text-based applications into graphical applications much easier.
Because graphical objects are not constrained to whole line and column locations, you may use non-integer values when specifying a line or column position. For example, "LINE 1.5" is a point that is midway between the top of line 1 and the top of line 2. Unless otherwise specified, the line/column position of a graphical object refers to the upper-left pixel of the smallest bounding rectangle that encloses the object.
Recall that the runtime treats the screen as two layers: a text-based character layer with a graphical-object layer on top (see section 4.3). So that the runtime can execute text-only applications properly, the line and column positions refer to the grid of characters in the text layer. Thus, the font used by the text layer defines the size of a line and column. We call a single character location in the text layer a cell. The height of the cell is the height of one line, and the width of the cell is the width of one column.