There's always been comments about the infamous “l” (layout)key that will take your carefully laid out network and destroy the visual readability. At least undo works with it now!

Anyway, I haven't noticed many tangible suggestions about ways to make automated layout work better - maybe I've just missed them. However, as I've been fiddling with things today, a couple of things came to mind.

1. Select a bunch of nodes. It would be great if there were a “vertical” and “horizontal” layout option. This would space *only* the selected nodes along the appropriate axis. This helps break out broad sections of nodes. Even better would be if they spaced them to fit within the widest/tallest parameter of the selected nodes. e.g. Let's say I want to break out 5 merge sops that will act as a horizontal “floor” from which I can arrange things above and below. I would move what my preferred leftmost node would be to the fartherest left position, the right to the right, then select all of them and hit the “horizontal” arrange. This would space them evenly between the two outside nodes.

2. Selective layouts. Using a portion of the previous suggestion - select a group of nodes, and only they would become arranged within the boundary box of the area they currently define.


The point of all this would be a way to quickly layout “regions” of nodes - at least it would be a start to laying things out the way you want, not the usually non-intuitive auto-layout, and quite a bit faster than manually moving each one.

This may be easier said than done - I haven't thought through all the logic of how you'd determine the sorting of selected nodes that have rather complicated connections…

Any thoughts, disagreements, whatever?

Cheers,

J.C.

I will use shift-L to lay out selected parts of my network then readjust the nodes as a block. I have also started to use snapping in my networks and like it. I set the snap grid fairly fine and move the nodes to snap. I use this especially in VOP and COP networks. The horizontal wiring seems to be more critical to layout niceness to me.

There has been some work on the “l” layout code in H5 but there is always room for improvement.

Well, there you go. I completely forgot about Shift-L. :roll:

Thanks Jeff

Cheers,

J.C.