[tgm]

Thanks to bheller and ericscheid for their suggestions, but I'd really like some shape "surrounding the objects. If I have to put them in an actual group to make this happen, that's fine with me. but is there some perimeter or border object? that could some how be anchored (for example) to some geometric center (centroid?) of the group?

It seems that outside of my very specific use case, others might also like to have some "encapsulating" shape as well.