About the Along Curve Optimization Strategy

The Along Curve optimization strategy searches for other annotation positions along the curve of a 2D item.

See Also
Annotation Placement Strategies

For example, this optimization can be used in combination with a success condition of No Overlap on a placement strategy of Along Item, to search for other annotation positions along the curve of the 2D item for which the annotation does not overlap with other 2D items.

In the Optimization Strategy dialog box, you can specify the required step distance.

Step Distance: lets you choose the optimization step (in mm) for searching along the curve. The step distance is a paper distance that must be constant and independent of the scale of the view or sheet.

Note: A step distance which is too high may fail the optimization, whereas a step which is very precise may lead to performance issues.

Working of Optimization Strategy

The computation of optimization strategy is as follows:

  1. An initial starting point on the curve of a 2D item is used for the search. The initial starting point depends on the default behavior of the placement strategy on which the optimization is applied.

    For example, we consider Along Item placement strategy in which the starting point is at the middle of the 2D item.



  2. A list of candidate points to test along the curve are computed. The candidate points are computed using a fixed step distance (curvilinear distance) along the curve on each side of the starting point, till the extremities of the curve.



  3. The optimization places the annotation by applying the placement strategy on each candidate point till the success condition of the strategy is achieved.