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LabVIEW Idea Exchange

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Mr._Jim

Wire Label Centering and General Position

Status: New

After a brief search I didn't see this one yet:

 

As I'm gradually changing over my wire labels to the "new" method, I'm noticing some quirks regarding positioning.  I'd like to suggest the following:

  • Let the font in these labels default to "centered", or at least allow the user to configure the default font on these.
  • Add an option to automatically center wire labels on the wire segment's midpoint.

I'd like to emphasize the "option" part on the latter, as this understandably won't be a good fit for every context.

As with other suggestions, I realize that this is somewhat subjective, so here's an example of how I'd like to use the labels.

WireLabelCentering.png

 

Here I've aligned all of my labels on their horizontal centers and have set the respective fonts to center justified.  My intuition tells me that, now when I start typing, all of these labels should remain aligned on their horizontal centers.  However, when I started typing out "Enable Speed Per Air Flow Rate", the whole label started wandering off to the left.  I don't quite understand how the alignment works, but it's not proving efficient in most of the instances in which I use it.

 

Thoughts?  Improvements on this suggestion?

 

Thanks as always,

 

Jim

2 Comments
VasC
Member

Kudos to the first option. There should be a way to specify default justification to labels. If possible, separation justification styles for wire labels and others.

 

As far as the second option is concerned, I am worried about the usability. Everytime you create a label, you need to right click on the wire and ask LabVIEW to center the label for you. A better way of doing it is - you can center the first label, and use the align tool to align all the labels to it horizontal centers which solves the problem for your use case. Other than that, I don't see any use case where I need the labels placed exactly at the center of the wire segment.

Mr._Jim
Active Participant

Thanks for your feedback, VasC.

 

> A better way of doing it is - you can center the first label, and use the align tool to align all the labels to it horizontal centers which solves the problem for your use case

 

Hmm... that's exactly how I used to do it for as long as I can remember, but it doesn't work consistently with the new wire-specific labels.  (At least not right now)  If you change the text in the label the alignment gets rather wonky very quickly, whereas with the traditional method you mentioned, one could change the text over and over and the centering remained intact.

 

I'm not sure I understand your concern about usability, though, since the latter suggestion would be an option.  You wouldn't really "need" to do anything - you could still use the alignment tool with free labels or object-specific labels.  I just thought it would be a nice option for a context I run into pretty frequently.  (The one illustrated above)

 

For what it's worth...

 

Thanks again for your comments.