Stardraw Forums

aligning connection stubs to grid

http://forums.stardraw.com/Topic6068.aspx

By keithgiles - 11/26/2010 4:08:12 AM

I used the symbol wizard to create a symbol for a floor pocket input panel.  The wizard created a symbol with connection stubs that were 2 grid spaces apart.  I rescaled the symbol to make the symbol smaller and especially to reduce the distance between the connection stubs to one grid space because that will match up better with the input/output panel that I created by modifying an MUSA patchfield symbol.  Although the connection stubs are exactly 1 grid space apart, they no longer align with the grid.  What is the best way to re-align the connection stubs with the grid so that my connections lines will run parallel to one another and without any unnecessary jogs.  Thanks!
By Rob Robinson - 11/26/2010 4:53:55 AM

It is not recommended to scale symbols since this affects all aspects of the symbol e.g. height, width, text size, IO stub length etc, so the symbol will not match other symbols designed for the environment.

Better practice, if you wish to modify a symbol, is to drag it into the Library List under My Libraries and doubleclick on the newly-created symbol to edit it.  In this way you could simply select the conection stubs and hit the arrow keys on your keyboard to move them one grid space in any direction.  This maintains the stylistic integrity of the symbol and is strongly recommended as not only the right thing to do, but also the easiest.

If you really do wish to align the scaled and mis-sized symbol to the grid there are, as with most things in Stardraw AV, several ways it could be done.  The success you'll meet with each method will depend on the scale you've used and how exactly the symbol is now offset from the grid.

  1. Select it and choose the Align tool in the Snap toolbar.
  2. Use the Command Line to re-position the symbol relatively - type in @x,y [enter] where x and y are the x and y displacements (you might want to refer to the Help file on Command Line functionality as this is an advanced topic).
  3. With Snap to Grid active draw a line then, with Snap to Object active, pick up the symbol at the end of a connection stub then drag it to the endpoint of the line which will be on a gridpoint.

But as you can see it's easier, quicker and best practice to save your symbol as a new file and edit it rather than ever scaling it.

By keithgiles - 11/27/2010 6:08:23 AM

Since this was a symbol I created, I don't know why I didn't think of simply moving the connection stubs.  Thank you for your thoughtful advice.  There is so much to learn and I'm anxious to get good at this!
By keithgiles - 12/26/2010 2:07:57 AM

I have two feature requests that have to do with the symbol creation wizard.  I have accidentally hit return several times now before I'm done creating a symbol with the wizard.  This happens mostly when editing the text on lots of ins and outs; "enter" is the default "next" on so many other programs that it's a natural mistake.  Once you have finished with the Wizard for a symbol, you can never get back into it!  The problem is that once you move from the Wizard to having to edit the symbol everything gets much harder to do properly.  The Wizard really is the easiest and best place to do this.  I'd like to see an "are you sure" question before the symbol is finished, or some other more sure way to confirm I'm finished.  Maybe "enter" shoud be the "next" key and you should have to click a "finish" box to send the symbol to the library.

Which brings me to the next suggestion.  When I pull up a symbol to edit it, it would be great to pull up the Wizard already filled in for that symbol.  Then you could edit the number of ins and outs and all the other parts of the symbol as if you were creating it from scratch.  I  notice that if I have problems with wiring connections etc. it's usually with symbols I edit outside of the Wizard.