Space Horizontal Bug ?

[matthew.james]

I have encountered a strange bug (?) with the "Space Horizontal" function where (sometimes) rather than spacing out the selected elements, it instead spaces out most of the elements (usually all except one) and just shifts the remaining element(s) into the range, overlapping others that have been spaced out. It appears that if the elements are re-ordered then the alignment will work (with that ordering).

For example, if the are 5 elements (A,B,C,D,E), roughly spaced and in alphabetical order, select them all and click 'space horizontally' and (under this buggy behavior) you may get 4 of them spaced out (A,B,C,D) but the 5th (E) moved to be somewhere between the 1st and 4th and overlapping other elements. This happens consistently with any re-arrangement of the elements whilst that are kept in that same order. If instead you re-order to put the errant element inside the order (eg A,B,C,E,D) then the space horizontal will work correctly, ie all elements spaced out and in the same order (A,B,C,E,D)

I can't determine the circumstances when this happens, but once it does (with a given set of elements) it seems to always happen - so feels like there is some property of the element(s) at play.

Further to this:
- Space vertically exhibits the same behaviour (with the same set of elements)
- Put the same elements on a different / new diagram preserves the behaviour
- Copying the elements (paste as new) fixes the behaviour and the new elements align as expected

Has anyone seen anything similar Any explanations / workarounds?

[Glassboy]

Yes I have seen behaviour like that.  What I do do as a matter of course when using things like the spacing functionality is make sure I have made  diagram elements - text and the like - non-selectable.  Sometimes you have accidentally selected something you didn't mean to.

[matthew.james]

Sometimes you have accidentally selected something you didn't mean to.

Yeah I checked that. Definitely not the problem in this case

[Sunshine]

Try box layout with the same columns as elements. It tends to work better.

[matthew.james]

Try box layout

Interesting, hadn't thought if doing that ... brb.

So - I can confirm that box layout, with the relevant elements selected, and a column setting equal to the number of elements (for horizontal spacing) or column setting of 1 (for vertical spacing), does work - even for the set of elements that exhibit the weird behaviour described in the original post.

There are however two downsides to this:
- more key presses and clicks to achieve the outcome
- loses the automatic 'space evenly within bounds' behaviour whereby I can position the two end elements and the other will space evenly within that (something similar could be achieved with a few goes of trial and error on the layout padding)

So, still not ideal (yeah I know, I'm fussy), but good to know for those strange times when the normal space evenly doesn't work

Thanks :-)