Adding "comments" to a graph (free floating text or call-outs)

Question

I am new to yEd, and I am planning to use it to map processes we are planning to document and automate for various humanitarian organizations.

It's a wonderful tool and I am still learning.

One thing I need to do is to add comments on the graph, either on the form of free floating text or possibly with some "callout" pointing to a specific box / connector.

Any help / suggestion on how to do this would be greatly appreciated.

Thank you.

Answer 1

yEd does not support free text. The way to go would be creating a simple (rectangular) node, adding the text to that node, and finally setting the node's "Fill Color" and "Line Color" properties to "No Color". Using this approach, a callout is simply an edge from the (transparent) text node to the specific node.

See also I would like to add Text to my diagram.

Comments

Yes, that's indeed a solution but I would personally need to be able to insert some comments which are not full text written/displayed on the graph itself but with some mouseover feature like in M$ Office, that be great. Indeed, it's one thing to draw a graph for printing, documenting, etc. but it is another one to maintain and retain some valuable information without having to display everything on-screen...

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If you want comments to appear only when the mouse hovers over a node/edge then use the node's/edge's Description property.
Alternatively, you could create a custom property for the comment and use the properties mapper to update the Description property if you need tool tip behavior or update node/edge labels for permanent display.

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Thanks a lot Thomas, that's indeed all I wanted! This is great, I was wondering what this "Data" tab was for. And what about the "URL" field? Do you know?

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See http://yed.yworks.com/support/manual/properties.html section "URL and Description".

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I have used this earlier to get a text title at the top of a swimlane. When I upgraded to 3.16 from 3.15 the unconnected node is no longer at the top but in the center vertically.

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I do not think that there was a change from 3.15 to 3.16 that would readily explain such a change in behavior. Could you upload the corresponding GraphML file and (if you have yEd 3.15 still available) a screenshot of the previous behavior?

See How to upload files to yEd Q&A? for instructions on uploading files here.