horizontal or vertical connection lines
 

Hello,

maybe it's a feature request, I couldn't find out a way to do this...

Let say I have a long horizontal line, and along this line, many objects, connected to the long line with short connection lines. (ok, some of you have guessed: it's a network.)

I want a way of forcing the short connection lines to stay vertical, even if I want to make the long horizontal line a bit longer for example. So, I guess I want the connection points between the shorter connection lines and the long horizontal line to stay vertically aligned with the point where the shorter lines are connected to their respective objects.

Is it possible? If not, does it look like a feature request you would consider?

Greetings,

Hmm. I like this idea ... constrained connector lines that stay within their orientation constraints while remaining connected.

This is something we're looking to address, I have a handy hack that works pretty well *if* you're not using any arrowheads or line endings. If that's the case, I'd be happy to post a sample.

I'm not using any line ending so I'm really interested in your hack =)

Get it [URL="http://people.omnigroup.com/jpage/OmniGraffleSamples/verticalLines.graffle.zip"]here[/URL].

The top object is actually a shape, it's the "Line" shape at the bottom of the palette in the Lines and Shape Inspector.

The bottom shapes have magnets at the North and South Positions, and the lines connecting are orthogonal, and are directly connected to the magnet on the "Line" shape above.

Hope it helps.

Thanks Joel -- that's very clever and very useful

-- Morgan

Any progress on this? Is it included in the roadmap to a particular version?

bump?

I really really would like to have that. I would call it “Bus line”, like the bus of a computer, where everything is connected to.

Actually, the problem can be solved if Omnigraffle starts supporting what I call “lines staying horizontal/vertical as much as they can, taking corners only if absolutely necessary”.

This is one thing Visio does better it seems: every time I import Visio documents, those horizontal lines are block arrows in Omnigraffle, they’re not straight anymore.

Example, for a better understanding:

2 objects that you want to connect with an horizontal line. Right now, you need to have either their centers at the same height or magnets at the same height. It would be great to be able to draw a line from one object to another and asks that it stays horizontal as long as possible, meaning as long as both objects have “overlapping height positions”.

Any plan on introducing this?

If you're running the latest version of OmniGraffle (5.3 or later), and you enabled the new line drawing behavior, you can get lines that always stay horizontal or vertical between two shapes, see my post on how to get them running, in particular the third post in the thread.

[url]http://forums.omnigroup.com/showthread.php?t=21650[/url]

Would this work out for your needs?