Rearranging text balloons

When text balloons are viewed on the Drawings on a Work Package (a.k.a. 'The Big Picture') they will be positioned where the field staff have put them - which may be convenient for them, but not necessarily for your uses. 

Text balloons can be moved individually. This will not affect the placement on the record that it came from.

There are new features available to Organisation Admins, Work Package Managers and Users to allow them to rearrange the text balloons as a group, or to select a specific group of balloons, and save the arrangement

This is a brief overview of the tools to move, align, separate or merge the various balloons together.

When viewing the Drawings on Work Package, click the 'Rearrange...' button to access the tools. 

Note that if you have thousands of 'pins' (text balloons) then you may want to change the colour scheme to blue (or similar) as they draw more quickly - as they have no border on them!

When you are in the Rearrange... screen your changes are not saved and you can try various rearrangements until you are happy with the result. Then you save it. 

This is different to when you move Text Balloons on the main Drawing screen as these are saved immediately.

New 'Rearrange' screen

The tools to move, align, separate Text Balloons operate only on the selected ones.

Selecting Text Balloons

1. Manually - Individually
   You can select them one-by-one, and use ctrl+click to add individuals into the selection

2. Manually - by drawing a selection area. Click on a space on the drawing, then drag the mouse to draw a yellow selection area.
   

3. By using 'Select All'
   

• All - Selects all the Text Balloons
  
  

• Invert - Takes what you have selected, then unselects them and selects all the ones you did not have selected
  
  

• Redo - This is specifically for selections. If you had a complex set of Text Balloons selected and then accidentally clicked on the background and lost it, you can click 'Redo' and get it back
  

Rearranging Text Balloons

Once selected you can:

• Move them by clicking on one of the selected Text Balloons and dragging.

• Move them all up, down, left or right using the green buttons

• Left, right, horizontally and vertically align them using the green buttons

• Space them out evenly between the highest to lowest, left most to right most, or add in a set space between them

• Apply a re-arrangement action from the drop-down

If you make a mistake

The Edit tool

This allows you to undo and then redo the actions you have taken. 

Movements

There are four movements. There are two illustrated below.

Move to the Left Edge

Move to the Top Edge

Alignments

There are four alignments, and they follow a similar pattern. Two are shown below.

Align Left

Align Centres Vertically

Space

There are four choices for spacing. 

The first two choices distribute Text Balloons from left to right between the leftmost and rightmost (and similar for topmost and bottom-most). This takes the space between them and spaces them Text Balloons across this space with even spacing between them.

The next two choices are to take the selected Text Balloons and separate them vertically of horizontally by the same set amount 

Distribute horizontally

Space horizontally

Arrange Actions

The choices under Arrange Actions perform specific optimisations, and we will add to this list when we develop new ways of presenting the Text Balloons

There are currently four choices:

• Vertical Short Arrows - give all text balloons a short pointer, as long as one balloon is tall, and move the balloon vertically above or below the location it is pointing at.
  
  

• Short Arrows - give all text balloons a short pointer, as long as one balloon is tall, and do not alter the direction of the pointer - just makes it shorter.
  
  
  

• Distribute to edges - Move all balloons out to the edge from the centre of the drawing
  
  
  

• Move apart vertically - If a Text balloon overlaps another one, or a location being pointed at, then move it up or down until it is out of the way.

• High density merge #1 - This is the first 'combination' function that will do several of the other transformations in one go. The intent of this 'Arrange Action' is to give you a good head start when the floorplan is covered in hundreds or thousands of markers.

Merge Balloons

The Merge Balloons control is on the main Drawing as well as the Rearrange... screen. This processes all the Text Balloons, and works through them all and creates a single Text Balloon for all the points that are close together. 

If you move the combined Text Balloon, the position of the top most text balloon that was merged is used to store the position of the merged text balloon.

If you Save from the Rearrange...  screen the value of the merge is also saved, along with any colour settings and any position changes.

The red circle shows the area where the merged Text Balloons come from.

Saving your work

The final drop down allows you to choose various ways to keep either a picture of the current view, or the entire Drawing.

The last option allows you to download a searchable PDF of the Drawing - so you can provide your clients with a PDF showing where their work is, and they can search (ctrl+F) for specific Text Balloons.

Your rearrangements are only saved if you click the Save button.