Feature Request: More sophisticated selection functions
 

My research frequently requires me to work with series of overlayed contour plots, which are essentially very complex and highly overlapped paths that are exported from scientific software as a postscript (the only option available) and converted to a PDF for editing.

One of the editing tasks I frequently do is select a particular set of paths (which usually have the same, unique color) and change their color. This is easy to do in Illustrator via the "Select-->Same-->Stroke Color" feature. Unfortunately OmniGraffle's selection functionality isn't sophisticated enough to handle this type of task. The OmniGraffle equivalent, "Select-->Similar Objects," fails to find a unique (based on color) group of paths.

I'd love to see OmniGraffle implement a feature set roughly equivalent to Illustrator's "Select-->Same" submenu. This is one of the last reasons I continue to use Illustrator instead of OmniGraffle.

As a side note, if there is a better way to go about this in OmniGraffle, please let me know. As I mentioned, the file is imported as a postscript, so there's no easy way to separate the myriad of overlapping paths into different layers, etc.

I've attached a screenshot of an example to show what I am working with.
[IMG]http://picasaweb.google.com/lh/photo/4GB5YCKLoVtTN7hniPlEUg?feat=embedwebsite[/IMG]

The Picasa image to which I've linked doesn't appear to show up within the post, but if you right click on it and select something like "show in new tab" it is visible. Apologies.

The Canvas: Selection Inspector will allow you to filter on things like stroke and fill and other object styles, and it should get you where you need to be.

Hope that helps,

Hi Joel,

Yes, that is almost exactly what I want. Certainly it's useable. Thank you, I didn't know about this feature.

There are some extraneous selections, so it looks like I'll have to select a few boxes per colored contour layer. If you feel like adding "color" or "stroke color" to that filter list, it would be perfect.

Thanks!
Michelle