Removing line jumps

Posted by stretch in Network Diagrams on Saturday, 2 Aug 2008 at 12:36 a.m. GMT

A cardinal rule of network diagramming is to avoid intersecting lines wherever possible. Line intersections, particularly many in close proximity, make casual inspection difficult. Of course, sometimes such intersections cannot be avoided.

Line jumps

Microsoft Visio adds line "jumps" to more clearly indicate flow, but these aren't always desirable. To prevent a line from jumping at intersections, select it and navigate to Format -> Behavior and select the Connector tab. Here we have the option to modify the placement of line jumps. We can opt to always add jumps to the selected line, to always add jumps to the lines intersected, or to remove them completely.

Connector dialog

After setting line jump addition to "Never" our drawing looks a bit more tidy:

No line jumps

You might have noticed there are several styles of line jump available beside the default arc. Try out some of these and see if any better suite your style (I recommend "gap" for a minimalist feel).

René Jorissen commented on 4 Aug 2008 at 7:54 a.m.

I am always wrestling with this issue. Very simple and effective blog post. Great ;-)

Paul Thomas - CCIE commented on 5 Aug 2008 at 3:10 p.m.

I like the gap look as well. If you want to do it on your entire sheet instead of a line by line basis you can do the following.

File > Page Setup - Layout & Rendering Tab - Line Jump Style drop down

Now you can leave your line's set to the default option and it'll do what the entire page says.

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