On how to get existing OmniGraffle files/stencils onto the iPad

[Joel]

There are currently three ways to get your OmniGraffle file (including stencils) from the desktop to the iPad. They are:

- Using the "Documents" area in the Apps tab of iTunes when the iPad is plugged into your computer.
- Emailing them to an account that's active on the iPad.
- Downloading them from the web.

That said, there are some important caveats to be aware of:

- When emailing or downloading from the web, ensure that the files have the proper OmniGraffle file extension (filename.graffle, filename.gstencil, etc.). This holds if the files are zipped up as well, they should be named filename.graffle.zip, etc.
- Stencils will automatically show in the Stencils popover, and as of version 1.0.1 they will also show in the Document Browser for editing and deletion purposes. We plan on adding better UI to manage stencils in the future.
- There are some custom stencils available at Graffletopia (http://graffletopia.com/) which won't open in OmniGraffle for iPad for some reason, this is a known issue on our end and we're looking into it.

Some overall best practices:

- "Flat" files work better than file packages in general.
- Compressed files (from within the Document Inspector on the desktop version of OmniGraffle) work out better due to space considerations on the iPad.
- Adding a Quick Look preview helps out when browsing documents in OmniGraffle for iPad.
- There isn't a provision for establishing a folder hierarchy for stencils on the iPad as of yet; you can however edit your stencils on the desktop to combine multiple files into a multiple canvas stencil that's only one document.

Hope that helps, please feel free to add feedback and experiences in this thread or send feedback to omnigraffle-ipad@omnigroup.com.

[BadExec]

- There isn't a provision for establishing a folder hierarchy for stencils on the iPad as of yet; you can however edit your stencils on the desktop to combine multiple files into a multiple canvas stencil that's only one document.
.

can you explain how to do that?

[Joel]

Yes, just add a new canvas or drag a canvas from another document to the stencil you're editing (drag canvases to and from the sidebar).

Hope that helps,

[Dbalmer]

Haven't been able to download a sinlge file from that site onto my iPad. Will try emailing but, but that's pretty lame.

[seeker44]

Hi - I was unable to get the iA iPad stencils to load using the techniques you describe. I tried using the iTunes Document area method, both with all the unzipped .png files and then with the <filename>.stencil.zip. I also emailed myself the .zip file and double-tap extracted them. It appeared in all cases that "something" was happening with the files but nothing new ever showed up in the Stencils list.

I'm new to Omnigraffle, so I may be missing something obvious. I haven't tried the Graffletopia stencils, as you said there are known issues with them. Could you perhaps point me to a set of known working stencils I could try again to install?

This is sent from my iPad; I'm just starting to use the iPad version and it's really really cool!

Cheers,
Eric

[Joel]

Update: If you're referring to the stencil located at http://informationarchitects.jp/ipad-stencil-for-omnigraffle/, it does not open in OmniGraffle for iPad on my end, however if it's made a "flat" file instead of a file package, it works out okay.

[seeker44]

Thanks Joel, but sorry, I don't understand what to do to make a zip file (package?) a "flat" file. Thanks.
-Eric

[Joel]

If you've got OmniGraffle for the Mac, here are the steps to make a document that's a file package into a flat file:

1. Double-click the stencil to open it in OmniGraffle
2. At the top of the Stencil window, there's a Gear button, click it and choose "Edit Stencil"
3. Once it's open, bring up the Document Inspector from the Inspectors menu
4. In the Document Inspector, at the top there's a popup menu for managing whether the file is flat or a package, select "Save as flat file"
5. Save the stencil

Then, you should be able to email it to your iPad and it should work from there. I should point out that we're treating this bad behavior as a bug, and hope to get it fixed soon.

[seeker44]

Thanks for the quick reply, Joel. Ay, there's the rub. I have only the recently-purchased OmniGraffleForIPad and not the Mac version. Is there any way to "manually" induce a flat file from the .zip?

Great support!
-Eric

[whpalmer4]

You could download the free trial version of OmniGraffle for Mac and use it to convert the stencil. Or you could download the flattened version at http://dl.dropbox.com/u/971671/iPad-Stencil-1-1-flat.zip though I'll probably remove it by the end of the week.

[seeker44]

@whpalmer4: Got it! Thank you. What a great community.

A tip for other OG n00bs: Whatever you name your stencil collection flat file will be the name that appears in the Stencils list icon. For example, the file kindly provided by whpalmer4 is the iA iPad stencil set. I named the file "iPad-iA" before uploading it to the iPad through iTunes, which is what now appears in my Stencils list. Awesome!
-Eric

[Joel]

A quick update as to why certain files aren't downloading properly -- In the case of the iA stencil, the download does not have the .gstencil file extension, so Safari doesn't know what application to associate it with.

In other cases, the name of the .zip file is different than the actual stencil name (underscores or dashes in place of spaces, etc.) and as a result, UIDocumentInteractionController cannot open the file.

We're looking into whether this is something we can fix on our end or not.

[Joel]

A couple of tidbits:

- If for whatever reason you edit a stencil on OmniGraffle for iPad, at this point it will be saved out as a normal OmniGraffle file and no longer show in the Stencils popover.
- As a result of the above, if you download a stencil that's uncompressed (from within OmniGraffle, using the Document Inspector), when you exit to the Document Browser, the newly-downloaded stencil will wind up as a normal OmniGraffle document as it's getting saved and compressed.

Bugs have been filed against this behavior, if your stencils are already compressed things should go okay.

[jstrande]

First, thank you for all the great insight on how to get this working!! I'm loving this on my iPad! The great thing about using this on the iPad is how easy it is to zoom in & out to quickly tweak something for detail!

When I import a stencil, it shows up on my Documents list and I accidentally opened one and then it disappeared from my stencils. Is there anyway that you could remove the stencils from the available documents to open?

Also, as an Omnigraffle newbie, it would be very helpful to have a manual to read at some point.

Thank you!!

P.S. I also purchased this for my Mac and I'll never prototype in anything else, it is an awesome tool.

[Joel]

Right now, we're keeping any custom stencils in the Document Picker in case you may want to delete the stencil (otherwise there's no other way to do so) -- We'll be adding better stencil management UI in the future, rest assured.

As for a manual, there is built in Help from the Omni menu in the Document Picker.

Hope that helps,

[jstrande]

@Joel - oh, that makes total sense. Cool on the better stencil management.

Cool, just found the help! Duh! :-)

Thank you! Keep up the awesome work - both the Mac & iPad versions are great tools!!

[bradrice]

I'm able to email stencils to myself following the instructions. However they show up as a document and only as a stencil in the list when I have that document open. Is there a way to make the stencil stay in the stencil list so I can use it for different diagrams?

[Brian]

Brad, check post #13 in the thread for info on what's going on; this is something we're working on now that we have iPads to test with. (The software simulator didn't support sending files from Safari or Mail to OmniGraffle.)

[bradrice]

I did look at #13 but even when I compress the image and send it, it doesn't stick in my stencil palette. I'm trying the webforms stencil.

[pktloss]

Not having much luck myself with most of the stencils from graffletopia.com on my iPad either. Most of them are the "flat" stencils I believe since the zip file contains just one single .stencil file.

I copy them over to iPad and they show up in the stencil pull down on a new doc but they just contain the text of each object and not the actual object itself.

It will be nice when these things work though. So much potential but really stuck for now without the right stencils. Most of what I am looking for are the network objects and cisco objects. I did get the "Basic Cisco Icons" and "Network and Peripherals" working. But that was the only two out of 8 that worked.

http://graffletopia.com/stencils/9 - Worked (Cisco Basic Icons)

http://graffletopia.com/stencils/213 - Not Flat File (Cisco Routers)

http://graffletopia.com/stencils/14 - Just Text (Cisco Services)

http://graffletopia.com/stencils/15 - Just Text (Cisco Voice)

http://graffletopia.com/stencils/16 - Just Text (Cisco Wireless)

http://graffletopia.com/stencils/13 - Just Text (Cisco Security)

http://graffletopia.com/stencils/527 - Worked (Network and Peripherals)

Also should note that it now takes a bit of time that lags between when you press on the stencil button and when it displays. Adding these stencils has significantly slowed it down. I assume its having to process or load up these stencils each time you press the button and it takes a while. Might be due to issues with the stencils not pulling up correctly?

[Joel]

I did some testing on the troublesome Cisco stencils listed in the post above, and it appears that the ones that aren't working except the Cisco Routers stencil are using placed EPS images, which we're obviously not supporting yet.

Another quick test with a raw EPS shows that Mail on the iPad can't open it as an attachment, so I'm unsure if the iPhone OS handles that image format as of yet.

I've filed a bug against this in our tracking database in any case, thanks very much for bringing it to our attention.

Sorry that I can't be of more immediate help with this issue, it would take quite a bit of doing to get those EPS images converted to PDF or some other format that the iPad can handle.

[pktloss]

Any chance you could elaborate on the comment about having the images in a .PDF format that the iPad can support?

Not sure I get the relation between pdf and omnigraffle. I have a couple of PDFs that have a bunch of these images that I've used in visio. You have me wondering if there is a way for me to use those PDFs as stencils in omnigraffle?

Thanks for your time.

[Joel]

Well, the EPS and PDF formats are very similar, however Apple has in past years been deprecating use of the EPS format, favoring PDF instead as it's more modern and more robust.

We've already found that the iPhone OS handles viewing and displaying PDFs readily, however this is the first that we've run into files with placed EPS images, hence the bug filed against this issue.

It's trivially easy to convert an EPS into a PDF (or other image formats) using Preview.app on the desktop, however there would be an investment of time spent getting at the individual images in the stencils as many of them are flat files and so converting the stencils to a file package, getting at the contents of the package, then converting all of the images to a format that OmniGraffle for iPad can actually display would be significantly labor intensive.

There may be a chance that we can either get OmniGraffle for iPad to display EPS images in a future release, or possibly update the desktop version of OmniGraffle to automatically convert to PDF on a special export for use with the iPad, that sort of thing.

[pktloss]

Joel, I really appreciate all the time and support you are offering, makes me feel good about my purchase knowing there is this sort of support.

I hate to bug you more about this but I am still not clear on something.

You mentioned again about having omnigraffle export to .pdf for the ipad because the ipad supports pdf files. However I don't understand how you would use a .pdf file within omnigraffle on the ipad?

The way you describe this it sounds like if I have a .pdf file that contains a bunch of objects that I would want to use as stencils I could? However I can't believe it would be that easy. Almost sounds like I could rename a .pdf to .gstencil and that would be enough.

[Joel]

When I'm referring to PDFs (and EPS) in this case, it's to the individual images in the .gstencil files themselves -- They are placed as images within the OmniGraffle file itself, which wraps around those images as well as any other Graffle shapes or text, etc. in the document.

When you save one of these stencils out to a file that's a file package, you can right-click on the file in the Finder and see the contents of the package, and then see that there's a list of EPS files within the document wrapper.

EPS images don't render on the iPhone OS, however PDFs will, so that's the reason why I mentioned it. Given the number of images in each stencil, converting each individual EPS to PDF using Preview, and subsequently re-creating the stencil or modifying the plist inside the file package to reference .pdf files instead of .eps would wind up being a laborious process.

So, there's no way to export the entire stencil to PDF and change the file extension as you mention, I'm sorry to have introduced any confusion leading to that idea.

[bhollifield]

Hey pktloss,

Like yourself, I primarily need Omnigraffle for network diagramming. I took Joel's information and found that making these conversions, on a small scale, is fairly trivial. Especially if, like me, you need this yesterday and can't wait for an update. Here's what I did:

1) Take the set of Cisco icons and condense it to a set of "Cisco Favorites", being those icons that you actually use (I found I don't touch 85% of what is offered). Create a new stencil in Omnigraffle of only those you need and save it as a package via the instructions earlier in the thread.

2) Save that package to your desktop. Right-click on the package and click "Show Package Contents" - this will open the package just like a file folder.

3) Notice all of the EPS files - double-click the first one to open in Preview. Then, just click File->Save As and re-save it as a PDF with the extension .pdf. Do this for the rest of the EPS files.

4) Make sure all of those PDFs are listed in the Finder window for your package, then delete all of the EPS files that are left over.

5) Double-click the data.plist file to open it. Scroll down to the "ImageList" row and expand that. You'll notice many of the items have the extension .eps - change all of those extensions to .pdf, then close and save the file.

6) Re-open that stencil in Omnigraffle and change it back to a "Flat File" as described earlier in the thread.

7) Copy that new stencil to your iPad and you should have a properly functioning Cisco stencil...

Hope that helps!

[hornfinger]

Any chance someone could post some properly formatted cisco stencils for us PC/Ipad users?

I have had noluck at all with the .zip ones off graffletopia

[bobfet1]

Anyone have the iPhone stencils as a flat file like whpalmer5 did with the iPad ones? I've been trying to get the "Ultimate iPhone Stencil" onto my iPad but the zip won't work and the folder won't transfer through iTunes

[sylencer]

Conversion from EPS (or EMF) is also possible within OmniGraffle. Just "Copy as PDF" and paste back into the stencil document, and there you have stencils as PDF embedded.

The only challenge I had is that some were Pantone 3015 CMYK, and some Pantone 3015 RGB, which I had to correct with Illustrator.

I will convert some more stencils, and put them on Graffletopia, if time allows.

[Brian]

Any chance someone could post some properly formatted cisco stencils for us PC/Ipad users?

I have had noluck at all with the .zip ones off graffletopia

Cisco stencils have been converted and posted. Get 'em over here (http://forums.omnigroup.com/showthread.php?p=78761#post78761).

[dsparks]

Just an FYI - if you have a dropbox account and have dropbox on your iPad you can put your stencils in your dropbox on your computer and then open it on the iPad.

[nylife]

http://graffletopia.com/stencils/42

I'm also a pc user and only a flat .gstencil file could work.
There are some parts of this stencil that already work.
What I need are 1, 2, 3, 5, 7, 9 under the "ui components" folder.

I do like the app, but there really should be a warning to pc users.
Claiming that "Many third-party OmniGraffle stencils are also supported." is very misleading.

[whpalmer4]

http://graffletopia.com/stencils/42

I'm also a pc user and only a flat .gstencil file could work.
There are some parts of this stencil that already work.
What I need are 1, 2, 3, 5, 7, 9 under the "ui components" folder.

I do like the app, but there really should be a warning to pc users.
Claiming that "Many third-party OmniGraffle stencils are also supported." is very misleading.

Unfortunately, the Konigi website specifically disallows redistribution of the stencils, or I'd be happy to flatten them for you. I did send an email to their contact point asking them to put up a flattened copy (and offered to provide same). I started to take a look at what would be required to convert a stencil by hand a while back, but as it was more idle curiosity than pressing need, other more important projects pushed it off the table.

It might not be a particularly big challenge for someone who already understands the two different file formats to come up with a Python or Ruby script that converts one to the other for you PC folks. I would suggest that anyone who wants such a tool send email to omnigraffle-ipad@omnigroup.com and request it so that they know how much of a audience there is for it.

[nylife]

whpalmer4, thank you for your reply and suggestion.
In my frustration of trying to download, unzip, import and test to see how and if there is any stencil that can be used, I had completely forgotten to check the license...

[nylife]

Me bad. Turns out that the stencil I asked above can be imported with just a few tweaks. Here is how I do it, for future newbies like me:
1. Download the stencils and unzip.
2. Go within the folder of "ui components", here you will see some folders with '.gstencil' at the end of their filenames. Zip all these folders. (You could also zip other single .gstencil files in this folders if you like. But they can be imported through iTunes already.)
3. Email all the zip files to yourself. (Transferring through iTunes does not work for me somehow.)
4. Tap on the attachment in you iPad's email and choose "Open in OmniGraffle".

The key is to have the zip filename matches that of the contained stencil, as discussed above. And it is ok to send/use the zip file straight away.

[GDruce]

Just an FYI - if you have a dropbox account and have dropbox on your iPad you can put your stencils in your dropbox on your computer and then open it on the iPad.

Wouldn't it be wonderful if you could save them back to Dropbox from OmniGraffle on your iPad.

Omni: Hint hint for a feature request.

Glenn

[whpalmer4]

Wouldn't it be wonderful if you could save them back to Dropbox from OmniGraffle on your iPad.

Omni: Hint hint for a feature request.

Glenn
Hint: to make a feature request, use Send Feedback from the Omni menu.

[lastfuture]

Wouldn't it be great if the Omni Group made a small standalone program that does nothing but convert OmniGraffle stencils into the flat file format until the app supports anything else?

I imagine it would not be too hard, right?