Alignment

Alignment will allow you to easily and precisely define the locations of sign contents based on other sign contents. This is great for braille, symbols, destinations, and much much more!

You can align any vertical edge to any other vertical edge, or any horizontal edge to any other horizontal edge. See the table at the bottom of this article for all of the options

Template Creation

A2-Room_ID_align.ai

In the example above, we're having the TOP EDGE of  Room Name Braille (our object) align with the BOTTOM EDGE of Room Name (our target), with a 0.375 inch offset. There are 3 major parts to this command:

1. Alignment command - How do you want this to align? In this example we're aligning the TOP EDGE of our object to the BOTTOM EDGE of our target
   • align_top_to_bottom:
2. Define the target - What do you want to align to? In this example, our target is Room Name
   • room_name
3. Offset - Do you want an offset from the target? In this example, we're having a positive offset of 0.375 inches (which is 0.375 inches BELOW the BOTTOM EDGE of Room Name).
   1. It is possible to have negative offset. When aligning left_to_right or top_to_bottom this will create overlap. When aligning right_to_left or bottom_to_top the negative will add space. 

The final result is COMMAND: Target Offset

align_top_to_bottom: room_name 0.375in

From there, just export as usual and upload into your sign type in SignAgent. No further adjustments in the sign type are needed.

 

 

Multi-Alignment 

Align to Sequential Targets

Sometimes a target will be there and sometimes it won't. In the three repeats shown below, the Destination sometimes aligns to the Symbol, but if a symbol isn't present on that row, it aligns to the Arrow, and if no arrow is present, it is drawn exactly where the X used as example text was placed on the template.  

To achieve this effect, we want the destination to first look for the Symbol and if it doesn't find one, look for the arrow next. The targets will be read by the system sequentially left to right so the resulting command is:

align_left_to_right: symbol 0.5in arrow 0.5in

 

Horizontal and Vertical Alignment

It is possible to align to two objects simultaneously. In this example the large text can occupy one or two lines and so we want to align the symbol (in red) to it top to bottom. The small text will also vary and so we want to align the symbol to it left to right. 

The syntax for this command will be exactly the same as a single alignment but separated with a comma. So in this case the bounding box layer would be named:

"center, middle, align_top_to_bottom: large_text 0.25 in, align_left_to_right: small_text 0.5 in".

The order of these alignment commands does not matter. 

 

List of Commands and Examples