Graph view - titles overlap

Bug graveyard
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1

Steps to reproduce

  • Create linked files with long titles
  • Open graph view

Expected result

  • The titles are either shortened or the nodes are spread out to prevent overlapping text

Actual result

The text overlaps and is hard to read

image
image783Γ—333 54.1 KB

Environment

  • Operating system: Windows 10
  • Obsidian version: v0.7.6

Additional information

3 Likes
2

Understood what it’s annoying, we don’t have any plans to fix this as it’s technically non-trivial to do collision detection on the text labels. If you want to read the text, zoom in more. If you only want to see the node positions, zoom out a bit and the text will disappear.

@Licat: let me know if you have any good ideas on how we can improve this.

2 Likes
3

I get the same problem sometimes. Don’t know if this can be implemented but i have two ideas

  • Make the text wrapping customisable, 1 word to 6 words per line for instance
  • rotate all the text say by 30 degrees.
4

Makes sense thanks for the reply! My suggested solution would be to trim all titles to X characters (followed by β€œβ€¦β€) when zoomed out, and reveal the full title name at closer zoom levels.

So you end up with the same thing of if you want to read it the full title, you can zoom in. But also, the graph is parseable when zoomed out too:) and no text collision detection required, just do it on all nodes! Do you think this might work?

5

There are overlapping notes names in local graph (even when there is enough unused space). This makes local graph almost unusable (especially when the notes names are quite long).

Π‘Π½ΠΈΠΌΠΎΠΊ экрана 2020-08-29 Π² 13.03.55
Π‘Π½ΠΈΠΌΠΎΠΊ экрана 2020-08-29 Π² 13.03.551754Γ—814 91.3 KB

Here is a video for quick example of the issue.

Environment

  • Operating system: macOS Big Sur
  • Obsidian version: 0.8.4, no CSS
6

@ryanjamurphy: This issue was merged into general Graph view - long titles overlap thread and I’m not sure this is a good idea.

This issue is about local graph, where notes are overlapping even when titles are not long, and there is enough space to place nodes without overlapping (see the image in the post above).

7

Thanks. I merged them because I believe solving one would also solve the other. The core issue is detecting collision between the labels on nodes in the graph.

8

How about simply truncating to a decent size long titles until you hover over them?

2 Likes
9

This is not a problem of a long titles in local graph: the nodes are overlapping even when the titles are short.

Π‘Π½ΠΈΠΌΠΎΠΊ экрана 2020-08-31 Π² 11.40.42
Π‘Π½ΠΈΠΌΠΎΠΊ экрана 2020-08-31 Π² 11.40.42690Γ—880 8.6 KB

This is a nodes distribution issue.

10

I agree with all of this, and definitely can deal with just zooming when needed.

With that being said, maybe rather than having a full graph solution tied up with node distribution, some sort of temporary translucent overlay could be put together so that during a hotkey down, only the nodes in view would temporarily get an ellipse or rectangular outline around their titles that would shift to avoid overlap (with subtle connector or arrow towards node). Movement would be independent of the nodes and this overlay text would temporarily replace the original graph view text.

Or, perhaps something like this, that I wrote in response to a pdf export request:

Thanks. I say this all the time, but I love Obsidian, and feel guilty every time I make these elaborate requests.

2 Likes
11

Re-upping this comment. Having an option to limit the length of titles (by words or by character count) would be a most welcome addition to Graph View.