Orthogonal Line Routing
 

I have searched the forum and done some poking around but I am not able to control the routing of orthogonal lines to the degree that I need. There seems to be some complaints about this but I would have expected there to be more, so am thinking I am not understanding the process 100%. Hopefully someone can explain.

I use Omnigraffle primarily for network diagrams and when I am drawing orthogonal lines connecting network points on devices, the line leaving the magnet normally always goes down or to the right before heading in the direction that it needs to go. Adding a midpoint as close as possible to the magnet does not help. This is not a problem when there is a single row of magnets but if there are rows of magnets directly on top of one another, the line heads down and makes a U turn before heading up, or heads right before heading up or in any other direction. Can one get the line to go up first?

Welcome to the forums, and sorry for the trouble this is causing! If you haven't already, you'll want to email the [EMAIL="omnigraffle@omnigroup.com"]support ninjas[/EMAIL] about this; we all browse the forums as we're able on top of our other duties, but in this case, the first Omni-ite to see your post has insufficient OmniGraffle-Fu to answer your question.

If you email the support ninjas, though, you're guaranteed an answer from someone more knowledgable in that app than I. :-)

I'm running into this same problem with trying to plan out a video patch bay with 80 magnets. Also, all the lines seem to want to intersect each other. I DON'T WANT THEM TO INTERSECT!

I guess I shouldn't say intersect, what I mean is that they want to lay on top of each other, which I don't ever want to happen.

Ok I sent this q to the "support ninjas" and got a response. It seems that this is expected behaviour but there is a feature request in that will allow more control over how the ends of lines are routed.
In the mean time it was suggested that objects, like a rectangle be grouped to the stencils and put over the ports. This way the line is connected to the edge of the rectangle and not to a magnet. Seems like a reasonable work around, and most of the stencils that come pre-installed with Omnigraffle are made like this. I have uploaded a couple of networking device stencils to Graffletopia and these will all need to be modified but this is a one time thing which should resolve the problem.

any idea how to keep the lines from joining each other? i want them to stay separated.

If you follow as per post 5 your lines should not join. If I understand your problem correctly, the only reason they are joining is because they are joined to a magnet that is part of your actual device. If you create a rectangle over the network port and put a magnet on the side where you would like your line to leave, then join the line to this magnet.
Wow... thats sounds pretty complicated, but its not. Have a look at the "rack elements" stencil and play around with the generic network switches that are in there, you will notice how you get the line routing to work much better.