# Surface plot or polyline plot **URL:** https://discourse.paraview.org/t/surface-plot-or-polyline-plot/7485 **Category:** ParaView Support **Created:** [June 25, 2021, 2:08pm UTC](https://discourse.paraview.org/t/surface-plot-or-polyline-plot/7485 "2021-06-25T14:08:05Z") **Posts on this page:** 1 **Showing post:** 6

### Author: ![Kenichiro-Yoshimi](https://discourse.paraview.org/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/k/ecc23a/32.png) [@Kenichiro-Yoshimi](https://discourse.paraview.org/u/Kenichiro-Yoshimi) #### Post date: [July 2, 2021, 12:30am UTC](https://discourse.paraview.org/t/surface-plot-or-polyline-plot/7485/6 "2021-07-02T00:30:04Z")

Hello, One way to offset the boundary edge is to calculate the **signed distance** from the boundary and then extract the lines at the offset distance specified by the **Contour** filter. For details on how to calculate the signed distance using the **Programmable** filter, see below. > [@Compute the signed distance field from a polygonal mesh](https://discourse.paraview.org/t/compute-the-signed-distance-field-from-a-polygonal-mesh/123): > > Goal Compute the signed distance field from points in a data set to a polygonal mesh. The signed distance field has many applications in computational geometry, and can be used, for instance, to find intersections of objects with a polygonal mesh. Background A signed distance field is a point-associated field that gives the distance from each point in a data set to some location or object. In this case, we’ll compute the signed distance as the nearest point on a polygonal mesh. The sign of the … The above operations are a bit complicated, please refer to the State file below. [plot\_mach\_and\_cp2.pvsm](https://discourse.paraview.org/uploads/short-url/bylHcFguiUnNg1uCCBxqwtImprS.pvsm) (995.9 KB) ![offset_1](https://discourse.paraview.org/uploads/default/original/2X/b/b3e8653ab69f908e360c122dfdc52cc7cc155f7e.png) --- _[View the full topic](https://discourse.paraview.org/t/surface-plot-or-polyline-plot/7485)._