How to deal with opacity in OG on iPad or Mac

[myersm]

I created a complex cellular pathway diagram using predominantly freehand drawing within OmniGraffle for iPad. Really nice.

Now I would like to make several versions of this diagram where I "focus" on a particular subsection by making the other sections less opaque (transparent). These will serve as intro slides for different parts of a presentation.

I'm pretty sure that opacity (transparency) is not supported on the iPad version. So I downloaded the pro version for the Mac to see if I could do it there. Unfortunately, all my freehand connecting lines and arrows have been converted to closed paths.

Please confirm that I haven't missed something that would allow me to achieve the desired effect.

My workaround will be to use the PNG version that the iPad creates when I take a screen shot of the diagram. I will then use an image editor on my Mac to select portions of the figure and create the transparency there. I should be able to do that after importing the PNG, I hope.

Thx

[myersm]

Ok, I don't think the single PNG image approach will fly. Maybe it would if I was more experienced with using an image editor (experimenting with Acorn).

[alheron]

Can't comment on the closed path conversion on the Mac version, but don't see a problem with the PNG approach. Import the PNG into your image editor of choice (Pixelmator for me) then copy the layer as many times as you need to create your focus levels.
All you need to do then is erase everything but your differing focus on each layer (hide the layers you are not working on to make this easier to see). Once you are happy you have created the differing focus for each layer then export multiple versions hiding all but one different layer each time to generate your slides.

Bit of a clunky work-around but quite do-able I would have thought.

Good luck

Al

[priceless]

The other way to go in the PNG approach is to make semi-transparent objects in your presentation software.

Keynote could do this easily and I'm sure PowerPoint can as well.

Then you can make those objects appear / disappear as you needed and get various transition effects, if that helps you

-- morgan