New layout proposal

[bumbeishvili]

By comparison, this is the same tree with the standard horizontal layout

Challenges:

• Complex when we have different node widths and heights
• Hard to maintain multiple layouts (need some kind of uniform solution)
• Need to address link overlap (it's possible with enhanced link generation func, with offset point - (https://observablehq.com/@bumbeishvili/curved-edges-compact-vertical-with-height-offset-for-mid-po)

Benefits:

• Better use of the available space
• Enrichment of layouts

[mzhukovs]

This would be fantastic - hopefully it would also expose control of level-assignment (instead of just auto-layout)? This would support a common org chart use-case - different roles are assigned to different job grades/levels and you may want to create "swim lanes" for them.

Example: if someone is an analyst (job level 3) and another person is a manager (job level 2), they would be in different horizontal "swim lanes" cutting across all of the different business units. So when you look at the chart across the organization you can see all managers in a single lane (and as a really-nice-to-have, a way to label that lane in the canvas and enable dotted lines or shaded regions/ some other styling, but just having the leveling is already a big win). e.g. like this chart but with people instead of process steps obviously:

Could be complex to handle for expanding/collapsing/adding nodes to make sure everyone is still horizontally aligned in their lanes as the chart updates.

This is also related to: https://github.com/bumbeishvili/org-chart/issues/205