Control over grid layout in agents and in the cleanup action?

I’m pulling notes into an agent from a number of different containers.
The agent automatically puts my alias notes into a grid that’s slightly too wide for my taste (I’ve set interiorScale to 1.5 in order for the notes’ labels to be legible through the agent)

I can’t seem to find any control over the dimensions of the grid that’s being laid out. Ideally I’d like to specify a width in “notes”, i.e. to say that I’d like my grid to show 5 notes abreast. Very ideally I’d like to specify that the notes are laid out in columns, one after the other.

Generalizing, it would be a nice feature of the “cleanup” action for notes.
In my case, I have lists of about 30 students which would make sense in 3 rows of 10. I know I can have this by specifying an adornment to gather my notes and widening-it so it carries three rows - but then they are laid out “row-first” instead of “column-first”.

Interesting concept.

I agree that this is an interesting idea.

If some notes are of different sizes, how should the layout algorithm act?

Different sizes, and different shapes. One approach would be to make the grid from rectangles whose dimensions are equal to the minimum bounding box + margins for the shape with the largest dimensions.

Then it becomes a question of top-align the shapes (as shown above), or center-align, or something else.

I tend to collect large amounts of identical notes - so the question didn’t occur to me.
Given my usage, I’d think :

  • specify number of rows (respectively columns)
  • choose row-wise or column-wise layout
  • lay out notes. Each column is as large as largest note in that column, each row is as high as the highest note in that row.

Laying out to largest dimension of all notes may become awkward if you have an outlier in one dimension.

Here’s an example where sorting is row-wise:

Layout distributes horizontally notes number 1,2,3,4; than vertically notes number 1,6,9,15,17. Everything is top/left aligned to these.
The same notes in a column-wise sort, specifying 7 rows:

Vertically distribute notes 15, 2,3,4,12,6,7; Horizontally distribute notes 4,9,16. Everything else is right/top aligned to these.

There are many options - choosing the right set to make this manageable, useful and nice-looking may take a while. I’m willing to play with it if you need help.

I’m en route to The Future Of Text right now (https://www.thefutureoftext.org), but we’ll take a look at this and add it, in some form, to the roadmap.