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

Using the Pen Tool to create your own shapes


There are a couple of ways to create your own shapes, but only two are preferred. Unfortunately, the easiest way, using binary operations on shapes (which is covered in a later section) is only available in OmniGraffle Pro.

Using this tool requires some planning ahead as the shape you'll create will be a closed shape from the start. This can be very confusing—and of all the tools available in OmniGraffle, this is the most difficult one to use.

This tool will let you draw both straight lines and Bézier curved lines. You learned about the characteristics of Bézier lines in Chapter 2, Stencils

You can start the creation of a new shape by clicking on the canvas where you want the starting point of your shape to be. A good starting point can be an angle, the start or ending of a curve – really any place not in the middle of a curve or a straight line.

There are four basic operations in creating new shapes, straight lines, curved lines and undoing your...