When moving objects on a map, their boundaries 'snap' to the nearest 0.5 unit of map measurement. In addition alignment guides are shown to enable grid-like placement if so desired. The guides can be turned off if they are distracting, via View menu, Guides.
Map view guides have been simplified and improved. Additional guides help to:
- align the vertical and horizontal centres of notes
- maintain uniform spacing between adjacent notes or place notes next to each other
- align the edges of notes
- maintain spacing between notes and the edges of the adornment that contains them
- place a note symmetrically between two horizontally-adjacent notes
- create square notes and notes using the golden ratio. These aspect ratio guides show as additional on-screen guide label when a relevant ratio is achieved.
- align left or right edges of notes to the midpoint of notes above or below them.
Guides look for equal spacing between adjacent sets of notes. If there are two adjacent notes, A and B, and C is then moved next to B, the guide will make the space between B and C the same as the space between A and B.
Guides examine the neighbourhood around notes with a circular shape, looking for other notes that are nearly the same distance from the circular note as the note being dragged.
The guide for centring a note between two other notes formerly considered only the notes closest to the dragged note. It looks for matches among all pairs in the vicinity of the dragged note.
If the shift key (⇧) is depressed while dragging this also disables guides, which are drawn in grey rather than the usual blue-green to show that they are inactive.
Whilst dragging a composite various guides including the aspect-ratio guide, that affect properties internal to the composite, are not displayed.
Map View endeavours to be smart about which guides it displays. For example, no amount of dragging an object can change its aspect ratio, so aspect ratio guides appear only when resizing an object.
A new map guide notices when a note or adornment is approximate the same size as one of its neighbours, and snaps the note size to match the neighbour. If no nearby note is approximately the same size, the guide looks for notes with approximately the same height or width.
A new map guide looks for 45° diagonal alignments between nearby notes.
The edge alignment guides examine notes within a radius based on the size of the dragged note, rather than based on a fixed radius. Diagonal alignment guides have a smaller range.
Grids and close-vs.-far objects
Guides can only assume so much. Sometimes it is desirable to align two items whose relationship is obvious to the eye but less so to the guide logic. For example, aligning the left edges of two important notes that are separated by many other notes. By comparison, guide logic is invoked on the relationship of the closest objects. If guides do not show the desired alignment prompt, use the explicit commands on the Arrange menu.
Automatic gridded arrangements
These grids are for manual positioning use. To alter the default layout behaviour of maps inside agents (i.e. their aliases) see re-arrangeable agent maps.