Virtually broken link problem

[IACIOFANO Carmine]

Dears,

during these summer holiday I went back to the village where I was  
born and OmniGraffle has been chosen as the right instrument for it.

Then, after many try, I defined my style for it, very simple, made of  
rounded rectangle for the people (with pink background for women and  
light blue background for men), using a small circle as object for the  
marriage/union as a conjunction for the lines starting from the joined  
people and as a starter for the lines to go to each birth guy.
As a background, on a shared locked level, horizontal lines, one for  
each year, so to also have an idea of the time relation.

Then, I started to populate the tree and I had vertical blocks for  
each family (let's say that my mother and my father they both had many  
brothers and sisters).

I also decided, as the simplest way for me, that any object will have  
its vertical position, so to avoid a continuous rearranging of the  
graph (I tried the automatic way of the automatic layout but when the  
relation started to be complicated, the automatic layout was not so  
able to keep the things in the right place). This was very simple to  
do just selecting all the objects and arranging horizontally with a  
fixed space

Now, the problem notes is the following: when I have to insert some  
cousin and his/her children in the middle of one of the first trees of  
family on the left, I created the new objects slightly on the right of  
the related parent, then I made a "select all" and, finally an  
"horizontal arranging with fixed space". At the end of this  
rearrangement, some of the lines of uncle/aunt with many children  
losed their connection with the related parent!
At the first, I noted that, selecting all the lines unlinked (they  
remained with the same starting point, like if they remained linked to  
a "virtual" parent) and starting to drag the origin, the lines  
immediately re-joined the parent. When it started to become difficult  
to look for each "virtually broken link" in the graph, I was luckily  
noting a different way to re-join the "virtually broken link": when I  
started to draw the graph I had the numbering of the years on the  
left, only on the pair years (1870, 1872, 1874, ... till 2008) so that  
I decided that my graph should start with an x=10 cm, leaving space  
for the test of year numbers. Due to the fact that the horizontal  
rearranging was also moving the relatives on the left, I had to  
grouped all the objects and set the left offset to 10 cm, and then  
ungrouping all the objects. This was magically re-join the "virtually  
broken link".

It seems like that the horizontal rearranging was not able to force  
the redraw of the window in the right way, in fact, if I save the  
document and I close it, when I reopen it the link are correctly joined.

For Your info, consider that I created 2 drawing areas, one for my  
side of relations and one for the side of relation of my wife, and  
that my drawing area contains, now (it is still not finished) 76 man  
objects, 73 woman objects, 44 marriage objects and 192 lines while my  
wife's one is waiting for her help (I hope I will be back at home on  
Wednesday evening). The document is quickly saved, without "include  
preview" option, and it is arrived to grow, for the moment, to a size  
1.4 MByte, without any problem of stability.


Let me know if You need I send You my file.


Carmine

Area s.a.s. di Carmine IACIOFANO & C.
Via Ronchella 9, 24020
Torre Boldone (BG) - Italy

Tel.: (+39) 035.19832001
Mobile: (+39) 335.5451056