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I work with a lot of circle shapes. When I start typing in them LucidChart often changes the shape to an oval. Is there any way to either constrain it to a circle so it doesn’t get distorted, or to restore it to a circle shape after I’m done typing?

Hi @TomG 

Lucid Native capability not covering a circle shape while typing or editing per your problem statement.

For you use case you can try other possibilities by making some play around.

 

Hope this helps - Happy to help further!!
Thank you very much and have a great one!
Warm regards

 


  Hi @TomG, thank you for posting and @Humas1985 for the comment! Just wanted to chime in with some additional information about the shape behaviour.

The behaviour of your shapes will depend on what you have selected for font size. 

If you set a size (eg. 10pt) and add text to a shape, the shape will resize to fit the text you’ve added.  On the other hand, if you have font size set to Auto, the text added to your shape will automatically resize to fit into the size of your shape. 

If you have circle shapes where the size changed, you can quickly make it a perfect circle again by selecting the shape then making sure the height and width are the same in shape options.

I’ve also attached a GIF demonstrating this: 


Hope this helps! Feel free to let me know if you have any questions :) 


Hi Leianne—thank you! That was super helpful.

For my purposes, I don’t want the font size to change automatically because it becomes unreadable as more text is added. Then I have to manually resize the shape to get the font size large again. 

On the other hand, I want the object’s shape to stay the same as I add text and the shape grows. Since it changes, I then have to go in manually and reset the shape dimensions in its properties.

It seems counter-intuitive to me that the object shape changes as text is added. When I work in other g’raphics tools (e.g., PowerPoint, InDesign, various mind mapping tools) the shape’s proportions remain the same as the shape grows to accommodate text.

It would be great if Lucid had a setting that would allow this behavior. I’m not sure where to offer that suggestion.


Hi @TomG, I’m glad to hear that was helpful! I did some more testing and found an easy way to achieve the behaviour you’re looking for 💡


To do this, add the circle shape to the canvas and select the shape. Open shape options and click on the ‘Lock’ icon between width and height. This will lock the proportions of your circle and keep it’s shape as you add text to it. See the GIF below for an example: 


You can also add this locked shape to a custom shape library so you don’t have to click on the lock icon every time.

Please let me know if you have any questions about this!


@Leianne C — thank you so much! That’s exactly what I was looking for. I’ll gradually recreate my palette to have shapes locked.

Three suggestions that would be nice enhancements:

  • It’s really hard to distinguish whether the lock icon is locked or not, at least on my Surface Pro. It appears that the color changes slightly when it’s locked, but it’s hard to see. Most apps I’m familiar with show an icon that has an open lock when unlocked, and a locked icon when it is locked. The Lucid icon is always locked and just changes color.
  • I have several times wanted to add a whole set of icons to a custom palette, but when I do that they are added as an image of the set, rather than individual icons. It would be really helpful to be able to drag a bunch of icons into a palette. So, e.g., in changing all of my icons to have locked dimensions, I could drag them all out, change them all, then drag them back in. Then I could go into the palette editor and delete the old ones.
  • In the palette editor it would be great to be able to select multiple shapes at once and delete them, instead of having to right click on each one and delete them individually.

Thanks @TomG, I’m glad to hear that was helpful! Thank you for also taking the time to share feedback, I have passed this on internally. 

We would also encourage you to share your ideas and feedback in the Product Feedback section of the community - this will  allow other users with similar requests to discover and upvote it, then add details of their own.

You can do this by creating a new community topic and selecting the Idea option under “What kind of topic are you creating?” For more information on how Lucid manages feedback via this community, take a look at this post:


Thank you again for taking the time to share your feedback, and please feel free to let us know if you have any questions. We are happy to help! 


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