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

Text shapes


A text shape has a behavior that is the same as a special configured compound shape. Notice that the rectangle is selected when you type your text – this clearly shows that your text shape is really a compound shape. In fact, the default text style is surrounded by a oblong which has no fill color, no shadows and no line strokes.

This also means that it is possible to start with a text shape, and then convert this into a compound shape. This is not something you normally would do, but working through the steps teaches you the how's and why's of the text shape.

  1. Click on the Text Tool in the tool-selector on the Canvas toolbar. The same principle about clicking once to execute the tool action once, applies to this tool in the same way as the Line Tool and the Shape Tool.

  2. Click on your canvas and enter the text: This is a text shape.

  3. Most of the work you are going to perform is in the Text style inspector palette. Click on this palette before you continue.

    The first thing you need...