Subtitles of the Movie

In changing connector behavior, we are first going to have a look at line jumps. Line jumps are what occurs when two connectors cross over one another. So let's select our connector tool here, and drag a vertical line down, a vertical connector. And then drag across a horizontal connector, so you can see that a line jump has occurred; it's a semi-circular pattern to show that the lines are crossing but they are not actually connected. Now that pattern that you see there can be adjusted. And how we do that is we can change it either for an individual connector or for all connectors on the page. So to change everything on the page, we go to File>Page Setup, and then select the Layout and Routing tab. And then under line jumps here, we have options as to where we want to add the line jumps, and the style of line jumps. So let's look at how we want to add the line jumps. At the moment, it says to the vertical line. So if we move that out of the way, you can see the line jump designation is on the vertical. We can change that to the horizontal line; if we click apply, you'll see we now have that on the horizontal. We can also change how the line jump looks. In the line jump style area, we have an arc currently; we could change that to a gap, like so. We could have two sides, looks like that; right through to any number of sides up to seven - applying that, we see that it looks pretty much similar to a smooth semicircle. Clicking OK now, we can also change it just for one particular connector in the diagram by clicking on the connector. And then we go up to Format>Behavior, clicking on the Connector tab, and then we have a line jump section here. Now here we say as page specifies, so that's what we saw in the dialog box - it will just pick up whatever we selected in the page setup layout and routing dialog box. Or we can override that and say that we never want a line jump to appear on this particular line. So we are dealing here with this vertical line at this moment. Or we can say that we always want the line jump to appear. So let's try that; that should override the settings on the layout and routing dialog box. So you can see now, we have got the line jump appearing on the vertical. Moving back to there again, I will say as page specifies, and it is now on the horizontal ones again. Also on there, we can specify the style as we saw before. So that covers line jumps. Let's look now at adjusting connector parts manually. Selecting our pointer tool, I will drag a selection around there, select those lines and delete them. And let me now drag a few shapes onto our page, and we will zoom out somewhat. And now if we select the connector tool, as we have seen if we do a dynamic connection through connecting onto our connector point here, then we can drag around to another shape, and the connector appears. Now on that connector, you will see there are little green diamonds here - they mark the vertices of the connector. And we also have little green squares with darker green crosses in them here, and they mark mid-points on the various line segments making up the connector. And we can click and drag on those to manually change the connector path if the automatic routing that Visio uses does not suit our needs, we can simply do that. So, we can for example make that closer to the shape, or we can pull it away again. And you'll notice here that an additional vertice has been established. We can get rid of that by clicking and dragging away. And dragging on a vertice over here, you can see that the way the connector routes around the shapes changes according to our needs. I have changed the connection points now here to shape-to-shape; you can tell by the solid red square there, and you can see that we remain with mid-points and vertices on the connector. And in the same way, we can reshape our connector to how we would like it to appear. So that concludes our look at connectors. In the next chapter, we will move on to looking at working with text.