Snap lines dont "see" objects when other objects are in between or on other objects

Question

When i move objects then snap lines help to align them with other objects on the graph. But when i want to align objects with objects where other objects lay in between those two objects, then it is not possible to use the snap lines to align them. Furthermore it is not possible to align objects using snap lines when e.g. one object is placed on another object, and the third object is not placed on that others 'parent' object. E.g. a shape B is placed on a rectangular shape A, and another shape C is placed besides A and B, and i want to halign shape C to shape B.

I hope its clear what i mean :) I put a example to the following graph:

http://yed.yworks.com/support/qa/?qa=blob&qa_blobid=11616317169977370434

Answer 1

You are right, nodes do block snap lines. That is intentional because otherwise there would be so many snap lines that editing would actually be harder for graphs with more than 10 nodes or so.

However, node overlaps do not block snap lines. E.g. if you remove the rectangular node with the triangles inside as well as all the triangles in your example, it is possible to align node "Shape C" with node "Shape B" although "Shape B" is inside node "Shape A".

Comments

ok, thank u. u are right, the more objects within a graph the more useless snap lines become. Maybe it would be possible to add another "alignment helper"?

E.g. the first selected object out of two selected object is the basis, and then we can use the "align nodes" functions to align the second selected node to the first selected node? Thus we could select any two objects and align them how we want, horizontally, vertically...