Making Space Inside the Map

Just chiming in that I’d find this useful too.

David

Related to this discussion, using View>Arrange>Cleanup, there is an option to set spacing. It is helpful in certain situations, but doesn’t work on adornments. E.g., in the attached screen shot, the default spacing of notes on an adornment obscures the number of incoming links except for the top row. It’s also a problem for outbound links, though there are none in this instance. I’ve tried increased spacing on cleanup for both sticky and unsticky adornments. Doesn’t work. Screen Shot 2020-05-08 at 1.36.30 PM|504x499

This is intentional: cleanup doesn’t move adornments. It’s seldom useful to use cleanup methods in the presence of adornments.

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I understand that, but it would be nice to be able to increase the spacing on adornments.

Let me clarify the last message. I wasn’t looking to use cleanup on an adornment, but to point out that the functionality exists to enable a user to set the spacing between notes, but it’s apparently only made available in cleanup. Why not make it more generally available to users, especially when Tbx’s default value for spacing obscures significant data in maps.

An important design principal in Tinderbox holds that notes stay where you put them. The note location is your idea and is permanent. The note is where is it is.

Now, this is waived in some explicit cases. Guides nudge notes into alignment; you can turn Guides off. Dancing and Cleanup move notes around, but only when go say so — and even then, Tinderbox requires you to jump through a hoop or two to ensure you really mean to do this.

Note that the spacing that Guides encourage includes even spacing at whatever interval you choose. That is, if you have two notes side by side:

 A --- B

then if you drag a third note C to the right of B, you’ll get a guide in the vicinity of the space represented by three dashes:

A — B — C

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Sounds promising. According to TBRef: “To map Tinderbox units to pixels use this formula: (N*36)-4 where N is the map unit figure.” Where can I use this formula to set a standard value that makes room to see the whole arrow for incoming and outbound links (for off map destinations and sources)? The Maps menu under Document Settings doesn’t seem to address spacing.

Ah, I’d forgotten: that might need revising/removing. I wrote that c.2008 when I was trying to export maps the HTML: at the time, between the app and web browsers of the time, it didn’t work. Since then we have 4k screens. Plus that original approximation was at normal zoom. For some reason the relationship also didn’t scale with map zooming.

From my experiments, if you use clean-up with a spacing of 3 or 3.1 you can see the numbers on both in and out stubs.

I’ve amended the article to indicate it refers to pre-v6+ versions of the app on non-4k displays, lest it mislead.

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I have used cleanup at 4, which also leaves room for long captions; e.g. in some agents I show the path of the original for each alias. That provides, at a glance, an overview of where the agent is finding notes. Too bad cleanup doesn’t work on adornments.