How to bind the endpoint of a line to a rectangle/circle in Illustrator?

Question

I am a beginner user of Illustrator and I like it a lot. I also like to make concept maps like this one:

I was wondering if there is a possibility to easily create and modify concept maps ?

The problem is that if I draw this diagram in Illustrator:

and then I move the rectangle on the left then the line stays where it is :

What I would like is that the rectangles are associated to the endpoints of the lines so that when I move the left rectangle then the line moves with it like this:

I wonder if accomplishing such a simple task with such a powerful vector drawing application as Illustrator is possible or not ? I would hope it is possible but maybe I just don't know how. Could someone please help me out with this ?

Answer 1

Let me answer the question itself - i.e. how to move objects together in Illustrator exactly as you ask.

Assume you have this picture, where there are 5 rectangles and 4 direct lines pointing as provided -

You want to move the grey rectangle to any other position in the way where all direct lines move simultaneously with the grey rectangle to the new position.

For this you click on Direct Direction Tool (or press A on keyboard)-

Next, you make a selection rectangle choosing the whole grey rectangle and the points of direct lines that touch the rectangle -

You should see that all points have solid color = are selected, and other points have white feel = not selected - exactly as on the picture.

Now, you locate the pointer above any part of selected objects (usually Ai will note by word "path" when you above some object in question), then you Click and start dragging to any location you want - all the objects will move as you expect them to move (in question I mean) -

or

In a similar way you can move any object as you want: you choose the nearest anchor points and you've done.

Answer 2

I would recommend something like:

• yEd, used to use this a lot, today not so much. Probably best for simple-moderately complex stuff. Good support for different formats.
• Gephi, for beautiful big force directed graphs.
• Tulip, havent used more than once seemed ok
• graphwiz, I use this all the time and then do final touches in illutrator. It probably produced the image you have.
• Mathematica, but this may be overkill.

Image1: A (random) graph done with yEd and Illustrator combo.

The reason is that you want to have a software that can give you a good automatic layout. Or you end up doing a lot of work. Other things if you want webpages or more options then look at:

• graphdracula, uses Raphaël.
• d3js, see examples, for very good interactive graphs for webpages. You can just copy the SVG tag contents and put into a file if you want to open these in illustrator
• Google charts

Other software of note:

• Microsoft Visio, tough to my knowledge has no auto-layout

EDIT in response to changed question:

No it is unfortunately not possible for a line to follow objects. But yes you can move them directly at the same time yes. What you can not bind a object to line. That is not the purpose of the application. Could it be made to work? Perhaps, I've done some experimentation with the API in this direction. It can be made to work but id can not see a terribly big market for this without the auto layout. Automatic layout algorithms for graphs are a bit tricky. When i used some effort and asked around my local academia if there was somebody there who studies this I got blank stares. The papers in the subject are a bit tricky to read and so far I've only managed to implement 3 of the most trivial routines myself with considerable effort (And two highly inefficient ones of my own). I have no plans to do anything about this.