Alignment guides with composite object
 

In my opinion, the alignment guides are one of the best things about OmniGraffle. Unfortunately, they seem to only lock to an edge or center of an object. I have constructed a composite object (an electronic part) which has several leads, some of which are not at the center or edge. I would still like the alignment guides to lock to these leads.

I tried making a composite object consisting of the object plus the leads. If I don't group these, the alignment works the way I want: it locks to the leads. However, if I group the leads with the object, this no longer works. Of course I need to group things so that I can place my composite object into a stencil. Does anyone know how I can do this?

Thanks.

Warren Nagourney

There's currently no way that smart guides can take into consideration components of a group, table, or subgraph, but that sounds like a good idea (so long as it doesn't get too aggressive).

Question: When you speak of "locking to leads", are you in fact attempting to connect lines to elements of the group?

If so, you can set lines to connect to the components of a group in the Connections Inspector (as opposed to the group as a whole), it may not be a suitable workflow for you as I suspect you're not actually connecting in an attempt to have perfectly horizontal or vertical lines.

Hmmm, I didn't know about the option to connect to components. I attach magnets to the leads that I want to connect to. This works fine, but it would be nice if I could position neighboring objects in perfect alignment to the leads - a connection guide which recognized the lead (a component) would do the job nicely. I guess the optimum would be to have a guide which recognized magnets, since they are cardinal points on an object to which one often would like to align another object.

Thanks.

wn

Joel

I would definitely support aligning to the grid elements of a table -- I just was frustrated by that very thing yesterday and ended up rebuilding my table with individual elements to make it work.

As for the aligning to group objects -- it could be handled in the same way as magnets are today, with an option for "align with group" or "align with individual elements" on a per-group basis.

--Morgan