Hi Martin

This is a brilliant point. In my project i have both versions. Would love some insights from ​@Marvin Reza or someone that knows the internals of annotations to give some more details here. If we can get the annotations (at least for P&Ids and other technical drawings) to point to the object it is connected to that would be great. These direct lines just referring to the doc itself makes a large plot of many P&Ids quite fast, pretty messy.

Also ​@Martin Miller give me your thoughts on this, I would like to be able to manually take away noise and “deselect” lines when I build a good canvas, what do you think?

Hi ​@Øystein Aspøy and ​@Martin Miller ,

Thanks for reaching out! Both of you have good questions and good points.

About the “internals of annotations”; the picture Martin attached, where lines “randomly” connects to the side of the documents are connections, happens when a diagrams.FileLink annotation (which we call the source annotation) does not have an exact one-to-one mapping to another target annotation in the file/document which the file link points to. If I recall correctly, we made this decision a long while back to reduce the amount of “noisy connections” in the Canvas. However, that assumption does not seem to be valid anymore.

As a quick-fix/stop-gap – to make the canvas easier to understand from first glances – would it help if we made it so that these “annotation to document”-connections had a large dot or an arrow at the endpoint that’s connected to the document? Then it would make it more apparent that the line is not going beneath the document, but is pointing to the whole thing.

For a more general solution, it would be nice if we first could have a chat on how you guys would expect it to work. ​@Andreea Oprea Maybe we could set up short individual sessions with Øystein and Martin on this soon?

​@Marvin Reza, ​I think parts of this recommendation could work.  I also believe the additional context you’ve shared on the annotation logic will be good for our team to re-evaluate. ​@Andrew Wagner ​@ryanbooker 

Another example below is from our reliability engineering teams, where we troubleshoot an issue.  As you can see, the connection across files makes it nearly impossible to get a clear picture of what’s happening.

I believe it’s a combination of what you’ve shared - user control to turn on/offline annotations to tell a story and greater modeling control of our file/annotations to enable a better experience visually so file lines do not have straight connections when navigating across files, documents, and images.

• Make it so that individual lines can be turned on/off rather than every connection line on the canvas (hiding / shading)
• Connect page connecter to page connecter on the P&ID (ex. path 234 connects directly to path 234 on another P&ID instead of to the entire page).
• Format the connection lines to have 90 degree angles and do not cross over the top of a document.

The team would gladly jump on a call and brainstorm/wire-frame product ideas with our engineering teams.