In many applications that use axes offsets for specifying the location of an object the axis offset is given as horizontal offset, i.e. as offset on the projection of an axis to the X,Y plane of the underlying projected coordinate system. An axis reference system as defined by the Application Server supports this kind of horizontal offset measurement with the Use horizontal offset setting.

For axes that do not contain vertical sections, i.e. where no two consecutive axis points have the same X and Y coordinate and different Z coordinates the mapping of a sloped offset to a horizontal offset is a bijective function i.e. the translation from two different sloped offset values will result in two different horizontal offset values and vice versa.

For axes that contain vertical sections the mapping is not bijective and therefore the transformation between horizontal and sloped offset will either be not possible or not meaningful. The Application Server itself will not check for vertical axis sections it is up to the user to understand the implications of axes with vertical sections.