Vector Stencils for OmniGraffle for iPad
 

Hello all

Has anybody found out how to make vector stencils for OmniGraffle for iPad? I have made my own custom version of the Cisco Stencils (with different colors, etc.), and in OmniGraffle for Mac they are clearly still vectorized (I can resize them at will without loosing quality).

However, as soon as I transfer those to the iPad, they get rasterized somehow. Am I missing something on the OmniGraffle for Mac end? Can I somehow force-vectorize them?

Thanks,

Roland

Nothing works for me .ai .eps, .pdf, .svg, etc... The only work around is to export as high res 300 dpi PNGs and there preserve some quality.

Wonder if this is a limitation of the iPad or the omnigraffle codebase.

Shame for being such an expensive program.

I have contacted the support ninjas about that, and they have acknowledged this as a bug already. I suppose it will be fixed.

Looks like they are rasterizing everything, regardless of a vector source or not... Which also makes the stencils quite big.

OK, good to know. I was reading in a few other places in the forum and I get the impression that the vectors are causing a memory issue in some cases. I know that iOS is aggresive about memory management. And that there are various delegate methods e.g

[CODE]- (void)didReceiveMemoryWarning { ... }[/CODE]

and if the code or application is unable to heed these warnings iOS will eventually just shut down your program. I am pretty sure this is different behavior from traditional OS X which typically have access to lots more memory.

So if I understand and interpret it correctly, I would imagine that the iPad Omnigraffle app is just being defensive and converting to raster to preempt the memory issue. Anyway, that is my read of it. But no one has said anything outright about it to me in a support email.

I don't mind using OmniGraffle Pro on the Mac to "prep" a stencil before it gets shared to the iPad. I can understand how certain complex vector graphics have so many points and complexity to them that it becomes difficult to process within the iPad's memory limits. Perhaps the solution is to create a "simplify" command in OmniGraffle that essentially flattens and "cleans up" vector graphics in stencils before sent to the iPad. Basically a user controlled "quality control" of vector graphics to meet the constraints of the iOS device. I don't need the things to be re-editable, just scale and resolution independent. So if there is an automated way to remove the complexity of a shape or illustration that would be fine with me. I recognize this is easier said than done.

My particular use case:

I am taking DXF 2D surfaces of products from auto cad, filling in the shapes and color and making realistic but "cartoonish" illustrations of my company's products for use in presentations. I use Adobe Illustrator to create the vector illustrations and then I drop them into OmniGraffle Pro on the Mac to make stencils. Think rack mount equipment. I want to be able to create vector versions and use the iPad for our sales guys to be able to quickly diagram a rack of our equipment and show customers. We have so many configurations and permutations that a tool like omnigraffle on the iPad would be great for this task.

I have found that high resolution PNGs work reasonably well and look sharp enough but I want access to the pure vectors as diagrams round trip between iPad and Mac (or Visio on PC).