Legend Position Options for Multi-Page Outputs

Understanding Legend Positioning

In addition to showing and hiding the legend on all pages or some pages, OnePager provides the controls in the “Project-View Properties” form and the “Template” form to make legend position decisions for the entire document and graph. These controls allow you to position the legend either inside the graph or on the document at various points.

The concepts for legend docking positioning apply to both single and multi-page project views while the concepts for legend anchoring apply only to multi-page project views. However, when creating multi-page views, some additional thought must be given to legend positioning.

There are four options available in OnePager for setting the initial position of the legend for single and multi-page project views. These are:

1) Docked to page – Place the legend at one of eight (8) predetermined positions along the edges of the page.

2) Docked to graph – Place the legend at one of (8) predetermined positions along the edges of the page. The “graph” is the rectangle that contains all the tasks and milestones, excluding row labels, swimlane labels, time axis annotations, margins, headers, footers, and title.

3) Free Floating – Without using any of the predetermined positions, place the legend at an arbitrary location with respect to the graph.

4) Anchored to page - Place the legend a distance fixed reference points and one of the eight (8) predetermined positions maintain this distance on all pages where the legend is displayed.

An analogy is in order. Suppose that we think of the sixteen (16) predetermined positions as berths in a harbor with two piers for berthing boats, one on the perimeter of the harbor and one pier on an island. The eight along the shore correspond to the predetermined positions associated with the document and the eight berths around the island correspond to the predetermined positions associated with the graph. The diagram below is a picture of the harbor with its island and the various berths available:

Now thinking of the legend as the boat and each of the four “berthing” options as the OnePager legend positioning options, we can carry the analogy a bit further:

1) Docked to page – Think of this as the boat in a harbor and assigned to one of eight berths along the harbor’s perimeter where the boat is FIXED to the berth tightly.

2) Docked to graph – In a similar way, think of this as the boat assigned to one of eight berths around the island and FIXED to the berth without any slack in the tie up lines.

3) Free floating – For this case, think of the boat in the harbor but not secured tightly to any of the sixteen available berthing positions.

4) Anchored to page – Here, think of our boat in the harbor but not tied up tightly to any one of the eight harbor perimeter berths. Rather, the boat is secured to the berth by a rope that keeps it a fixed distance from a berth itself along the harbor’s perimeter.

Given this analogy, what does the OnePager project view look like as a single page document and as a multi-page document using the four options described above? To make it clear, we will use a sample project view where we’ve created the document with large margins to help illustrate the concept. The graph area is the blue rectangle that contains all the tasks and milestones. The document area is the graph area plus row labels, swimlane labels, time axis, title, headers, footers, and margins.

Dock to Page

1) The example “Print Preview” below places the legend in the upper right corner of the page in the single page project view where the right margin is made larger for illustrative purposes:

2) The legend is docked to the upper right corner of the page as specified. If we change this project view to a 2 by 2 document of four pages with the same margin settings, the “Print Preview” will look like this:

3) In the “Print Preview” of the four page document with the “Docked to page” option, the legend remains in the upper right corner of the page on all four pages. The legend itself does not change dimensions.

Dock to Graph

1) The example for “Docked to graph” shown in the “Print Preview” below places the legend in the upper right corner of the (blue) graph area in the single page project view:

2) Here the legend is clearly docked in the upper right hand corner of the graph.

3) For the multi-page “Print Preview” we will change the graph from a 1 by 1 to a 2 by 2 configuration and leave the legend controls untouched. When we do this the “Docked to graph” presents a set of pages that will look as follows:

4) The legend is clearly placed inside the graph on all pages. Also, since this example is for illustrative purposes, the legend is oversized but nevertheless the same size as the legend in the single page example previously.

Free-Floating

1) The “Free-floating” option is the ultimate in flexibility but may provide for inconsistent results with multi-page outputs. As mentioned above, this option is without any docking or anchoring at all and depends on where you place the legend manually.

2) As an example in a single page document, suppose we are using the “Free-floating” option and place the legend away from all docking points on the first page as shown below:

3) In the project view above we’ve increased the right margin of the document so that the legend will fit comfortably inside and have placed the legend with manual positioning to be about centered in the margin area but down from the upper-right docking position and above the center-right docking position. When we change the pagination from 1 by 1 to 2 by 2 we get the following result:

4) Notice how the legend moves around in the right margin from page to page. It doesn’t remain where you intended it to be except on page 2 above. This is because OnePager is trying to keep the legend in a position relative to the two page breaks that define each page, while also keeping the legend on the page.

a) Considering page 1 above, the legend’s center is on the page break that defines the right edge of page 1. But OnePager doesn’t want to put the legend off of page 1, so it puts the legend as shown in page 1 above.

b) Page 4 shows a similar hugging of the top page boundary and page 3 shows hugging of both the top and right edges of the page. Since, in this example, you wanted to place the legend in a “pleasing” location centered between the right edge of the graph and the right edge of the document, but the output with the “Free-floating” option does not preserve this intent. To accomplish this we need to turn on the “Anchored to page” option presented next.

Anchor to Page

The “Anchored to page” option, when compared to the “Free-floating” option discussed just above, will provide better results in the multi-page situation because the anchoring forces the legend center to maintain the same displacement from a reference location on every page.

Using the information from the eight (8) compass points, allows OnePager to replace the edge-hugging by more sensible spacing from each page’s edges. (You can also achieve consistent positioning by using the “Docked to page” option, but if you want to move the legend slightly away from these eight predefined positions and still maintain page-to-page consistency, using the “Anchored to page” option is the solution.) Anchoring is a much more flexible way to “dock” the legend at a consistent location on the page.

1) To show an example, let’s create a single page project view with the margins expanded and the legend positioning option set to the “Anchored to page” option. That project view would look like this:

2) Note that above, the legend was manually repositioned to the left and below the predetermined upper-right docking position. If we now create a 2 by 2 document while using this legend position and positioning option we get the result shown below where the legend is anchored to the upper-right corner of the page:

3) Above we see that all four pages of the document have the legend positioned consistently in the same relative position. Subsequent movement of the legend in the “Normal” or “Page Break” view modes will correspondingly reposition the legend on each of the multiple pages.

4) Finally, it is important to note that anchoring achieves page-to-page consistency for non-margin locations too. However, being in a page-consistent location on each page is no guarantee that the legend does not obscure some tasks and milestones on some of the pages. In practical terms, margin locations for the legend are the safe bet for consistent legend positioning in multi-page.

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