Aligning symbols on a grid

Simile's desktop area can display a grid of horizontal and vertical lines which is used to aid accurate placement of model components. The display of this grid is turned on or off by means of the toggle-grid button () in the menubar. The functions of the grid can be activated whether or not it is currently being displayed.

Controlling grid appearance

The pitch of the grid (frequency of lines) and how heavy they appear on the desktop can be adjusted from the 'Layout' tab in the Preferences dialogue. There is also an option on this tab to select whether the grid appears initially in a new window.

Using the grid

The 'Edit' tab in the Preferences dialogue has a checkbox labelled 'snap to grid'. When this is checked, any component added to a model will 'snap' to the nearest grid intersection. When dragging a component, or dragging a submodel boundary, it will 'jump' between successive grid intersections or lines. This does not happen when dragging a link to change its route, when dragging a component's caption, or when dragging a bowtie along a flow.

Components that were previously placed higgledy piggledy can be aligned to the grid by selecting them, then choosing 'align to grid' from the Edit menu. This works whether or not 'snap to grid' is checked. Components are aligned on their parent submodel's grid. Note that if a submodel has a relative scale that does not go into 1 an exact number of times, then its internal grid will not match up with its parent model's grid.

Changing the grid pitch does not itself cause components to snap to the new grid; this must be done afterwards using Edit -> Align to grid.

In: Contents >> Working with model diagrams