Layout Cleanup

When a diagram gets messy, you usually want one of two things: either everything is nearly aligned and you just want the drift gone, or the layout never really happened and you want it computed for you. livediagram has a tool for each, grouped under a Cleanup section in the tab and canvas menu. They are complementary, not duplicates: one snaps the positions you already have, the other recomputes positions from how the diagram is wired together.

The two tools

• Auto-align is a grid snap. It rounds every element's position and size to a 10 px grid so near-aligned shapes become exactly aligned and small drift collapses. Nothing moves more than 5 px. See Auto-Align.
• Auto Layout ("tidy up" in the command palette) reads the arrow graph and computes brand-new positions, laying out connected shapes into clean layers, or into a style you pick: flowchart (down or right), tree, or mindmap. It can legitimately move an element across the canvas. See Auto Layout.

How to run them

Open the command palette (⌘K / Ctrl+K), type Auto Layout or Auto-align, and pick the tidier you want under Actions. Both run on the whole active tab as a single undoable step, so if the result isn't what you hoped, one undo puts everything back exactly as it was.

The tidiers are for editors: it isn't offered in a view-only session, and it leaves a locked tab alone, so unlock the tab first. Inside an unlocked tab, a locked element, or anything on a locked layer, stays exactly where it is.

The two tools compose nicely. Auto Layout finishes by running Auto-Align, so a freshly laid-out diagram is also grid-aligned. If you want, you can run Auto Layout to get the structure right, then trust it has already snapped to the grid for you.