📑 Positioning factors

Positioning factors on the map using ranks

The layout engine (GraphViz) which creates our maps does a good job and mostly we don’t want to mess with it.
However sometimes you might want to compare a map with a Theory of Change and you want more control over layout.
Here are some hacks to help you.
You can use these hacks when hard coding factor labels or when soft recoding using
✨ Transforms Filters: 🧲 Magnetic labels.
  • To make a factor appear on the far right of the map, add *99 to the end of its label. e.g. Health behaviour *99
  • To make a factor appear on the far left of the map, add *0 to the end of its label.
  • If you have a group of factors which you would like to put in the same rank left to right, add another number to the label e.g. *3. You can do that for different groups of factors by adding a different number to each group.
Things to note:
  • Apart from 0 and 99, the other numbers only designate groups. It is not the case that say factors labelled *5 with necessarily be laid out further right than factors labelled *4.
  • These tricks apply to the final version of the labels after other filters are applied. So if you zoom out to level 1, you will need the *numbers to be at the end of the top part of the label e.g. Health behaviour *1; hand washing
  • These *numbers are not shown in the final map, but they are shown in the tables.
  • At the moment, the auto cluster and magnetic cluster algorithms do not remove these *numbers, so they won’t work quite as well.
  • None of these tricks make the factors you relabel appear on their own: there may be other factors at the far left or far right or mixing with some other group.
  • They may make your layout less optimal.