How can I prevent my shapes from resizing when typing in Lucid?

Question

There is an autolayout behavior that seems to aggressively resize my boxes and blocks as follows.

How do I turn this off everywhere and not have to lock size (and unfortunately position) on every single block I add? This behavior and the known work-around makes it pretty impossible to effectively use the software to make a specific layout -- which is the point of a drawing program.

Replicate:

I create a box or block

I explicitly size it and place it somewhere in my diagram.

I start typing text in the box.

At some point Lucid simply resizes the box. This may be make it shorter, taller, or shrinking or expanding both dimensions

I have not asked it to resize the box, and now Lucid has messed up my diagram and I have to rearrange things.

When this repeats on literally every block in the diagram, my work productivity goes to zero and then actually becomes negative.

Humas1985 · Accepted Answer

Hi ​@dmaszleLucidchart automatically resizes shapes to fit text, and there isn’t a global setting to turn this behavior off. To fully prevent resizing on a specific shape, you need to lock its size,though this also locks its position.There is an active community feature request to allow locking only the shape size (without locking position), because Lucidchart’s current behavior always locks both together, and without this, auto-resize of shapes when typing cannot be fully disabled.To learn more -Lock the SIZE of a shape in Lucidchart without locking the position | CommunityHope this helps - Happy to help further!!Thank you very much and have a great one!Warm regards

dmaszle · Answer

Huma,I appreciate the the response, but can I ask this a different way? What is the point of allowing me to resize a box if the moment I type a character in it Lucidis going to aggressively resize the box? This is the behavior I am seeing.Also it is not consistent andnot obviouslypredictable when changing a single letter in the box will trigger a resize that potentially messes up the diagram and results in needing to fiddle about to get back to the look that I had already designed.I would also add that individually locking and unlocking objects is an infuriating idea in practice just to get Lucid to stop changing something I just set to particular size.I see other posts from the community regarding this simple request to just leave the object alone after it’s drawn and placed in a certain position and size. The responses similarly simply say that that is how it works, or that you are considering adding an additional feature to selectively turn off the sizing. What is missing in those response seems to be any understanding of how maddening this is.There are two ways this autosize works and it seems like Lucid used to only do one of them. Mymain frustration is that I draw a box of a standard size in a diagram, and layout a diagram. I then go back and annotate the boxes (or may have to revisit and modify the box labels). When I type a small amount of text in the box, the box SHRINKS around the text. I have explicitly sized and place this box. You are now actively changing my diagram that I drew. This is not a normal drawing program behavior and makes laying out a consistent diagram an actually painful and unfun activity.I think the behavior isa major bug and it's incredibly annoying. And I would add that this behavior is the singlelargest reason that I will stop using Lucid for any given project and go to another tool.

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