Connections sometimes go haywire

The connections between notes sometimes get confused. The side of the note that they emerge from is not consistent, sometimes they run through notes instead of around them, sometimes they have sharp angles and enter on a far side of destination note. I don't see any way to adjust either the connection points on the notes or the paths taken by the lines.

I just had a whole fretboard go crazy where every line went out at a strange angle, took a sharp bend, and entered the target note from the back. This happened after first aligning and then distributing the five fretboards on a page. I wish I'd taken a screenshot, but I was desperate to get the diagram back to how it was supposed to look. But I can show you this snippet, which shows connections going straight across other notes. It's a little hard to see but there are dotted lines connecting the pairs of square notes across the round notes on the bottom. The lines used to dodge nicely out of the way.

Attachment 253

Is there anything we can do to correct this type of situation? Am I missing some inspector or other property that can adjust how connections are routed? Thanks if you can clarify. Once a fretboard gets this way, deleting notes and connections doesn't seem to change anything. It's as if the model is confused about the placement order.

Best wishes and say healthy.

Trevor

Aw nuts, it already happened again. I copied and pasted a fretboard. The original is above. The copy is below.

Attachment 254

Ah, I restarted the app and things are back to normal. I should have done that first. I should have mentioned this is all with the latest release, 2.1.3. So something sometimes gets confused that gets cleared on a restart. Nevertheless, if there are any means for adjusting the connection paths that would be good to know. They're often not quite where I want them.

Hi Trevor,

Could you email over an fbd document that readily exhibits this behaviour? If you've any ideas on what triggers it that'd be extremely helpful too!

You might want to consider using the 'polyline' tool instead perhaps.. It's just above the connections in the toolbox - it lets you create an arbitrary line with control over routing/bendpoints, and the ability to add end decorations such as arrows. One downside is that it isn't "sticky" so if you move your notes/fretboard you'd need to remember to move them also!

There's some info and example polylines on the last page of the "What's new in ND2" sample document..

I couldn't come up with a repeatable case. But as I said in my later post, it seems to correct itself on restarting the app, so it must be an artifact that occurs during manipulation. I saw it happen (I think) after using the redistribute function and cutting and pasting. But of course, not normally, I use these all the time and everything usually works. My guess is that some linked list is getting populated incorrectly and it looks like a later object is earlier in the drawing sequence, so things are being avoided that aren't in the way and vice versa. If I find anything repeatable I'll let you know.

The polyline is great BTW but in this case I was quite happy with the normal routing while it was working, mostly just straight connections. And then once it went haywire, I couldn't get back to the normal straight lines, a straight connection would always get drawn with odd bends and curves etc. Anyway I'll watch for a simple case.