13298 Second Align With cancels first

[chrisjj]

Here's a comparison with an Align With on lines L14 and R36, with me about to click to set a second Align With on lines L12 and R32:



but when I click, the first Align With gets dropped:



Any idea what's up?

Workaround: manually restore the first Align With. Mysteriously this does not cancel the second.

[Aaron]

Hi Chris,

Is this repeatable for you if you reopen your files and follow these steps?

If so, could you email us this pair of sample files and your current Support package (Help menu -> Support; Export)?
Please also include a link back to this forum post.

[Chris]

I discussed this with Tim, it is behaving as designed in the current version.

In BC 3.2.4, alignment works from the beginning of the file to the end of the file. When you do an align with, it forces that alignment, then realigns everything further down in the file.

In your above example, you aligned text, then did another alignment of text that was earlier in the file. If you reverse the order so you align text at the beginning of the file first, it should keep both alignments.

Making the manual alignments stick if you don't do them in order from the top of the file down is on our wish list for a future version of BC.

[chrisjj]

Making the manual alignments stick if you don't do them in order from the top of the file down is on our wish list

Thanks.

[Michael Bulgrien]

I have found that the current implementation is better than manual alignment functionality I've used in other programs. On the other hand, I've had my own frustrations with manual alignments in the past... and I absolutely agree that manual alignments should not affect the alignment of lines before or after prior or later manual alignment points set by the user. I would also like to see an option to save manual alignment definitions with the session settings so that they are re-applied automatically when the session is reopened.

Of course, one cannot expect to always be able to automatically re-apply alignments on a pair of files that have changed...but perhaps there would be a way to preserve the alignment points if, for example, nothing changed prior to that particular alignment point. This could be accomplished by calculating a checksum/character count between the beginning of the file and the first alignment point, then between each following alignment point applying them until a mismatch occurs. If a mismatch occurs, do the same character count / checksum check from the end of the file working toward the front of the file until a mismatch or until the alignment that failed in the forward check is reached.

Regarding the scenario you reported... currently, I have the best results when I select an entire section of text to manually align, then click drag the corresponding section on the other side... However this can be a tedious and tiresome way to do it (especially for large alignment blocks) and simply keeping track of and respecting prior alignment points should, in many cases, make this type of work-around unnecessary.