How to auto space nodes while keeping hte existing layout?

Question

How can I auto space the nodes in a BPMN swimlane diagram to the default node to node and node to edge or minimum node, minimum edge, and minimum pool distances without changing the diagram layout?

Answer 1

Any change in an element's geometry is a layout change. Thus changing the distance between nodes is changing the layout.

If you are asking how you increase distances between nodes without changing the order of nodes, you can try running BPMN Layout with "Layout Mode" set to "Use Drawing as Sketch". This will only work well if your current layout is actually a valid result of the BPM layout algorithm, though.

Comments

Thank you for the answer!
You did phrase the question right, what I meant was indeed "how to increase distances between nodes without changing the order of nodes".
Would you consider adding a functionality allowing for only spacing the nodes without impacting the order in a future version?

---

Re.:

Would you consider adding a functionality allowing for only spacing the nodes without impacting the order in a future version?

yEd already has that functionality to the extend that is technically possible. In other words, there simply is no algorithm that can do what you are asking for. And I do not mean there is no such algorithm in yEd, I mean there is no such algorithm at all.

The best you can do is the "Use Drawing as Sketch" approach which is supported by hierarchical layout and BPMN layout. Additionally, organic layout supports something similar with scope "Only Selected".

The only other thing you can do is uniform scaling of distances. yEd offers "Tools" -> "Geometric Transformations" for this purpose. However, uniform scaling does have its own disadvantages (e.g. it will usually not preserve orthogonal edge paths).

---

Thank you for your help and your patience.
I now know how to use yEd in this context.