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 category in the tab and canvas context 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 fixed grid so near-aligned shapes become exactly aligned and small drift collapses. It never moves anything far. See Auto-Align.
- Auto Layout (also called Tidy Up) reads the arrow graph and computes brand-new positions, laying out connected shapes into clean layers. It can legitimately move an element across the canvas. See Auto Layout.
Auto-Align
Snap current positions to a tidy grid when things are just a few pixels off.
Auto Layout
Recompute the whole diagram's layout from the connections between shapes.
How to run them
Right-click an empty part of the canvas (or the active tab) to open the context menu, then find the Cleanup category and pick the tidier you want. Both run on the 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. Each also leaves a single activity-log entry.
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.
Both tools work entirely offline and deterministically. They never call out to anything, so they're available in every deployment, including a self-hosted one.
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