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PostRoll Help

Auto-layout on boards

When a board gets messy, you don’t have to line everything up by hand. Boards can arrange your nodes for you — cleaning up spacing or laying connected nodes out as a diagram or a tree.

Running a layout

Section titled “Running a layout”
  1. Select the nodes you want to arrange (drag a box across them, or select the whole board).
  2. Open the Tidy / Arrange menu from the toolbar that appears above the selection.
  3. Pick an option. The nodes rearrange instantly, and the board suggests the option that best fits what you’ve selected.

The options

Section titled “The options”

Which options show up depends on what you’ve selected:

  • Tidy — always available. Cleans up spacing and overlaps without changing the overall shape. The safe, general-purpose choice.
  • Arrange flow — appears when your selection has connecting edges. Lays the nodes out as a connected diagram following the direction of their links.
  • Arrange hierarchy — appears when your selection looks tree-shaped. Lays nodes out as a top-down tree of parents and children.

Advanced options

Section titled “Advanced options”

Need finer control? Open Advanced… from the same menu to choose:

  • Engine — Dagre (the default) or ELK for more complex graphs.
  • Direction — Top → Bottom, Bottom → Top, Left → Right, or Right → Left.
  • Spacing — a slider for how much room to leave between nodes.
  • Algorithm — extra ELK-specific algorithms (shown only when the ELK engine is selected).

Family-tree boards

Section titled “Family-tree boards”

Family-tree boards use a purpose-built layout that bonds couples together and stacks the generations. Adding a relative re-arranges the tree automatically — see Family-tree boards.

Section titled “Related”