Create better diagrams with less effort using OmniGraffle
We will start with a few tips on making your diagrams visually appealing:
So far you have manually moved shapes around your diagram. You have also learned that you can use visual guides in your diagram to align elements. However, for the majority of tasks, you used the Smart Alignment Guides and the Smart Distance Guides found in the Arrange | Guides application menu.
Next, you see a shape that is aligned with both the Smart Alignment and Smart Distance guides enabled.
The thin blue lines going through My Shape in the previous diagram are a visual indication that the shape is aligned both to the shapes to the left and above. If you have a diagram with a lot of shapes close to each other, the Smart Alignment Guides may not seem so smart anymore. In fact, the guides will not align to whatever shapes you wish they should align to. In these circumstances, using manual guides is the only good solution for very precise shape alignments.
The Smart Alignment Guides will appear when you align two or more shapes to each other.
Between the shapes you see the visual measurements that appear when the Smart Distance Guides kicks into action. The guide shows that the distances between My Shape and the two other horizontal shapes are equal to each other—creating horizontal symmetry. The same is also true for the vertical distance guide.
The Smart Distance Guides appears when you try to distance three or more shapes from each other.
Until now you have resized shapes manually by dragging on the shape’s resize handles (the small squares found on each corner and on each edge).
If you wanted to make two or more shapes the same size, you’ve had to do a lot of work manually. Instead of manually working on each shape, you can use the Arrange | Size menu commands . You can also find the same commands using the context sensitive menu that appears if you right click on any shape, or selection of shapes.
There are all together five sizing commands available (Make Same Width, Make Same Height, Make Same Size, Make Natural Size, and Size to Fit Image). You can size shapes to the same height, the same width, the same width and height, to their natural size and finally you can resize a shape to fit an imported image.
Executing this menu command will resize the shape to cover the length and height of an associated image.
A natural sized shape is a shape where the height and the width of the shape are the same.
The resizing is done based on the longest length, either vertically or horizontally. If you resize a shape which is wider than it’s tall—then the Natural Size is calculated based on the width of the shape. The same applies if the shape is taller than it’s wide—the Natural Size, in this case, is based on the height of the shape.
The shape is always resized from the center line (either vertically or horizontally).
Let’s learn by doing.
Start with a new canvas – add a rectangle to the canvas, and place a manual guideline through the shape’s horizontal center line.
After either using the Arrange | Size | Make Natural Size menu command , or right clicking and using the Size | Make Natural Size menu command , the shape is resized into a perfect square where each side has the same length and width.
As you can see, the horizontal center is still intact.
You have at your disposal three resizing commands that can only be used if you have selected more than one shape. The commands are to make the shapes the same width, height, and both width and height at the same time.
We cannot stress this enough, but the order in which you select the shapes affects the end result.
The result is that the rectangle is now the same height as the triangle, as seen in the screenshot below:
Let’s try to select all the shapes and then use the Make Same Size menu command.
You can select all the shapes by using the ⌘+A keyboard shortcut command.
If you got the following result, this is because the rectangle and triangle where already selected (remember that the order in which the shapes are selected matters).
If you instead had deselected any shapes prior to using the keyboard shortcut, the result would have been as expected because the ellipse was the fi rst shape you drew on the canvas.
To complicate matters even further, as you drew the ellipse first, this shape was the top-most shape in your diagram.
If you add a new cloud-shape to the right of the triangle, and order this shape to be the uppermost shape using the Front function (
Now, hit ⌘+A to select all shapes on the canvas, and then issue the Make Same Size menu command.
The following screenshot is the resulting diagram:
So far you have worked without using a visible grid on your canvas. With the aid of the Smart Alignment Guides and the Smart Distance Guides, you have made perfectly aligned and good-looking diagrams. If your diagrams are much like the ones you have created so far, you may never have to use a grid when placing shapes.
However, if you are making diagrams, which represent “real life objects” – using a grid is a must. These kinds of diagrams can be anything from a diagram showing the new office layout – to a diagram for showing offi ce visitors where various parts of the building are.
You turn the visibility of grid lines on or off by using the View | Gridlines menu command. You could also use the ⌘+ keyboard shortcut command.
In the previous screenshot, you see the canvas with grid lines. The thick grid lines are called the Major Gridlines, while the thinner lines are called the Minor Steps.
You can control the measurement unit in the Major Grid Spacing input field using the Canvas Size Property inspector.
The default spacing for the Major Gridlines is 2,54 cm / 1 inch. Between Major Gridlines, there are eight Minor Steps as default.
You can adjust the Major Gridlines and the Minor Steps by using the Grid Property inspector found in the Canvas selector.
I remember deciding to pursue my first IT certification, the CompTIA A+. I had signed…
Key takeaways The transformer architecture has proved to be revolutionary in outperforming the classical RNN…
Once we learn how to deploy an Ubuntu server, how to manage users, and how…
Key-takeaways: Clean code isn’t just a nice thing to have or a luxury in software projects; it's a necessity. If we…
While developing a web application, or setting dynamic pages and meta tags we need to deal with…
Software architecture is one of the most discussed topics in the software industry today, and…