General Settings Display Preferences

The General Settings category allows you to control the overall look of the diagram.

The following preferences are available on the General tab:

Property	Description
Window color	Sets the background color for the diagram.
Unit	Specifies the measurement unit for symbol size. You can choose between inches, millimeters, and pixels.
Snap to grid	Automatically aligns all objects in the diagram to the anchor points of a grid. Control the visibility of the grid, and the number of anchor points per square inch with the Display and Size options:
Show page delimiter	Displays lines showing the limit of pages on the diagram background.
Constrain labels	Limits the distance to which you can displace labels from link objects. Uncheck this option to be able to move link labels anywhere in your diagram.
Show bridges at intersections	Creates a bridge (or "line hop") when two links cross to show that they do not intersect. This preference has no effect on link symbols with free curve corners or CDM association links.
Automatic link routing	Calculates link paths to avoid crossing object symbols and to space links regularly. You can manually move routed links, and the algorithm will respect your choices and exclude such links from its calculations. To revert a manually moved link to its automatically routed position, right-click it and select Reroute Link. This preference has no effect on links with free curve or free angle corners, CDM association links, or any links in EAM organization charts, BPM process hierarchy diagrams, OOM sequence diagrams, or XSM XML diagrams.
Organization unit swimlane	[diagrams with swimlanes] Specifies that organization units will be displayed as swimlanes. You must also specify whether swimlanes have a Horizontal or Vertical orientation.
Darken Child Symbol	[diagrams with composite symbols] Specifies that the symbols of child objects are darker than those of their parents in order to make them stand out more.
Orientation	[diagrams with tree structures] Specifies whether branches expand in a Horizontal (left to right) or Vertical (top to bottom) orientation.

The following preferences are available on the Word Wrapping tab:

Preference	Description
Word wrapping	Controls the display of text on symbols and links. You can choose between: None Truncation - Truncates name (or code), to the specified length Word wrapping - Wraps name and code text onto additional lines (up to the specified length) after the specified wrap character This preference is overriden if you manually resize a symbol or link text label. To reapply the wrapping specified here, select the symbol or link text label and press Ctrl+J.
Wrap characters	Specifies a set of characters after which word wrapping is possible.
Display overlay for non-local objects	Enables the display of an overlay on objects being reused in the same container but with distinct location. For instance an activity can be reused under another activity of the same package or an inner class can be referenced by another class of the same package. The overlay is a mirror image of the shortcut overlay (see Creating Shortcuts).

The Format tab can be used to set the default size for all symbols in the diagram. Values entered here can be overridden for specific objects on the Format tab for each object type (see Format Display Preferences).