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

Manually adjusting diagram elements


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...