Book Image

OmniGraffle 5 Diagramming Essentials

Book Image

OmniGraffle 5 Diagramming Essentials

Overview of this book

If a picture is worth a thousand words, why settle for anything less? Creating good visualizations to substantiate your ideas is essential in today's corporate environment. Use OmniGraffle's remarkably powerful and flexible features to get your diagrams right. Although fun to use, it can get cumbersome to find out exactly how to get what you want.This book will teach you how to make stunning diagrams without spending much time and energy. No matter if you have never used OmniGraffle, or if you are using it on a daily basis, this book will teach you how to get the most out of this splendid diagramming tool. It will first teach you the basics of the program and then extend your knowledge to a higher level.The book will teach you to make eye-popping visuals using a lot of useful, step-by-step examples. It begins with covering concepts that beef up your basics of using OmniGraffle. The earlier chapters will teach you to prepare dazzling diagrams from scratch with the many stencils, shapes, and fonts that are included in OmniGraffle. As your understanding of OmniGraffle broadens, the book will go even deeper to explain the less understood features of the software. It also covers some handy time-saving techniques such as workspaces and keyboard shortcuts.By the time you reach the end of this book, you will have mastered OmniGraffle to turn your ideas into diagrams.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)
OmniGraffle 5 Diagramming Essentials
Credits
About the Author
Acknowledgement
About the Reviewers
Preface
9
OmniGraffle workspaces
Index

Singular shapes lines


As you've learned in Chapter 1, a line can have an arrowhead. It is also possible to assign an arrow tail to a line. It would thus not make much sense calling this shape a one-dimensional shape.

When working with the diagrams so far in the book, you may have noticed that the line shape works a bit differently from the compound shapes. Compared to other shapes, you can drag and drop the size of the shape in both the horizontal and the vertical direction to change how the shape looks.

A good example is if you start with a perfect square (or a rectangle as the proper name really is), you can extend this shape into an oblong. With a line shape you cannot make this into a rectangle. You can only change the length of the line by dragging and dropping; you cannot extend its thickness without resorting to using the Line and Shape style palette.

A line shape can have the following properties:

  • Shape stroke and color

  • Stroke corner radius

  • Shadow type, color, and size

  • Connection points...