Stencils and PDF images?
 

I keep running into issues with most of the stencils I want to use from graffletopia.com being created with PDF images.

I have seen many posts where support from Omni has mentioned that this is a problem on the iPad not being able to handle stencils with PDF images. Seems to be a common issue.

I don't have a Mac nor Omnigraffle for a Mac obviously nor do I know anyone who does. I would love to be able to invest time in fixing many of the stencils, particularly the ones meaningful to me but I can't since it seems you can only create stencils using Omnigraffle on the Mac.

I'm not familiar with the technical reasons as to why the full version of Omnigraffle has to be used to create stencils but it makes me curious as to the possibilities of Omni releasing some basic tool for Mac and Windows that would simply allow people to create basic stencils.

Nothing fancy, heck I don't even need text, I just want all these objects grouped together in a different stencils. Or something that would allow you to convert Visio stencils to Omnigraffle stencils supported by the iPad.

Probably asking for too much, and I am sure it has asked a thousand times before by others but it seems to me that Omni would want to do something like this allowing for easy creation of stencils for their products as it would allow companies to produce stencils with their products or devices easily and for free thus giving Omni's customers and potential customers more stencils to leverage making the product have more value to them.

Of course I come from the networking side of things and my needs are basic and the stencils I want are basic. I just want stencils with network devices by product category. My views on all of this is likely skewed by the fact my needs are so basic. I'm just still pretty aggravated by the fact I still can't leverage Omnigraffle for iPad yet as I would like due to the lack of compatible stencils.

No inherent technical problem with PDFs, it's just that the file format is often used to store lots of high-rez image data that can quickly use up more memory than the iPad is willing to let OmniGraffle have access to.

Taking some PDF with a whole mess of layers and flattening it down to a PNG means that it uses a lot less memory. :-)

Creating stencils in the iPad app is something we're very interested in adding; it just didn't make it in for the initial release.

Which stencils on graffletopia are you having trouble with? We may be able to help or offer alternatives...

Any chance someone could do something like this for a networking stencil please? I am dying to make use of this for work

[QUOTE=hornfinger;77839]Any chance someone could do something like this for a networking stencil please? I am dying to make use of this for work[/QUOTE]

Is there a specific stencil you want?

I was after the basic cisco stencil here:
[url]http://graffletopia.com/stencils/9[/url]

That would be a great start, also the cisco voice, wireless and security ones would be nice too :)

Here are some of the ones I really wanted:

[url]http://graffletopia.com/stencils/9[/url]

[url]http://graffletopia.com/stencils/213[/url]

[url]http://graffletopia.com/stencils/15[/url]

[url]http://graffletopia.com/stencils/13[/url]

[url]http://graffletopia.com/stencils/16[/url]

[QUOTE=hornfinger;77878]I was after the basic cisco stencil here:
[url]http://graffletopia.com/stencils/9[/url]

That would be a great start, also the cisco voice, wireless and security ones would be nice too :)[/QUOTE]

The basic one is trivially done -- just download it to your desktop machine, unzip, and email it to yourself. Read that email on the iPad, tap the attachment button, and tap the Open in "OmniGraffle" button.

Looks like the issue with the larger photorealistic stencils is indeed file size - they're all several megabytes in size once you unzip them.

The "Cisco Basics" and "Cisco Physical Routers" stencils open up just fine on the iPad if you unzip them and install them from iTunes, though.

(Unlike the garden stencil that I repackaged for another customer, we don't own the images in those stencils. I'm not sure if copyright law allows us to re-package them.)

Ah well that sucks but thanks for checking. Guess I need to buy a Mac and Omnigraffle so I can make the stencils I need to run on the most expensive iPad app I've purchased that is useless to me until I can get the proper stencils working on it.

This has become very disappointing as I had really high hopes.

I will try installing the ones you mentioned via iTunes, swore I did that and it caused omnigraffle to bog down real slow every time I went into stencils area.

Thanks very much, I didn't realize you had to unzip the files THEN email them. So the basic cisco icons and general network icons stencils work, no luck with the wireless, voice or security ones. I am guessing that's to do with the type of image files. Either way it's great to be actually using this productively and gives me other stencils to play around with