OmniGraffle Tip: Scaling with LinkBack
posted by William on 09.12.06 @ 2:10 pm
Martin Jaggi brought up a good point on the OmniGraffle mailing list: it would be nice to resize objects in OmniGraffle as if they were an image, not a set of objects. LinkBack makes this possible.
Say you have a nice bunch of objects in OmniGraffle you’d like to scale while having the text, stroke width, corner radii, and such scale along with them:
If you just select them all and Shift-drag the corner handle, the lines stay the same width, the corner radii stay the same, and the font size stays the same; not quite what you want:
But! If you instead select them and choose Copy As PDF from the Edit menu, you can paste a representation of all the objects as a single object:
Then you can scale the PDF like a normal image; everything scales with it:
Here’s the cool part: because the PDF contains LinkBack data, you can double-click it to open an OmniGraffle window with your original objects! Edit them however you like, and when you hit Save, the PDF version updates!
Wouldn’t it be natural to have this sort of resizing behaviour if the objects were grouped?
By Cameron Hayne on 09.12.06 2:58 pm
It should be natural Cameron, but it isn’t. Text, for example, will not scale down (unless you follow this method).
By Davezilla on 09.13.06 10:04 am
Thanks, I was wondering how to get this to work.
By Matthew Barker on 09.13.06 4:36 pm
Perhaps there are two kinds of ‘natural’. I can certainly imagine circumstances could arise where I wanted to resize a set of grouped objects but where I didn’t want properties like line-thickness to change, and that is equally natural to me … in fact I have the feeling I’ve been there already.
I think this is a brilliant way of going about the resizing. Using “Paste as PDF” means that what is conceptually a single graphic can be resized with all its properties adjusting; where you conceptually still have a group of elements all of which you want to resize but without changing their properties, it can be done the normal way.
Mark
By Mark on 09.13.06 7:09 pm
Once I figured out how Linkback worked (with the Paste as PDF automatically making a Linkback), I’ve been using it in every one of my projects for *exactly* the reason outlined above.
My prior workflow involved creating an OGP document (letter sized), with multiple canvases, each canvas being a wireframe page (I’m an IA). I’d then “export all objects” as PDF. I’d repeat this for every canvas. Then I’d pop it into a new OGP tabloid document for annotation.
If I had to make revisions, I’d open up the original document, make the changes, and re-export, and re-import. Now, I just Copy-As PDF into the annotated doc, and make my revisions via double click from the Linkback functionality. This has saved *soooo* many hours of mindless production work.
By CM Harrington on 09.27.06 10:13 am