Global text styling
 

Hi all,

Forgive me if this has already been answered, but I have searched high and wide.

Does anyone know if it is possible to set up some global text styles (e.g H1, H2, H3, body, etc) within OmniGraffle, in the same way as you can with most word processing and design applications and the way it works for HTML and CSS?

Ideally I would like to be able to apply these styles to text across various templates and then have the flexibility to tweak the style globally and for it to automatically be update across all of my templates.

Will buy a beer for anyone who can give me a good answer!

Thanks!

Well, you can add styles and call it H1...(Styles pull-down in the ruler bar), but you can't alter it globally like you could in MSWord. Visio kind of does it, if you consistently use document stencil objects.

Neither the text inspector nor the font palette gives you access to styles, so changing a style requires selecting the text with the text tool.

(imho, the style feature in the ruler bar feels like a bandaid. As if the code which creates the inspector is too difficult to add a styles feature. It's pretty common in the industry to have a really cool feature in an app that is too expensive to update. It's also very possible that the engineer that coded the inspector is no longer working in that capacity and no one else want's to endanger the app's stability by mucking around with it. That's the case with 90% of Visio features)

You can select all the text in a given style using the Canvas:Selection Inspector, filtering on font only. Once that's done, you cange change the style for all that text at once. Select all the canvases in the document first and it works document-wide.

If you'll have enough styles and you're going to be working on the document long enough to make it worthwhile, you could set up a Styles canvas. Put a text object there in each style whose text is the name of the style to aid selection of a named style throughout the document.

That's not a complete solution because you still have the additional step of changing the style in the Styles pull-down. It also works only within a single document. Did your mention of templates mean that you want to simultaneously change styles in many documents?

John,

You can select objects and change fonts, but I don't understand where you can add, edit, remove text styles from anywhere but the styles pull-down in the ruler bar tools and only when text is actually selected. If an object has multiple styles such as a text block with a H1 and and H2, changing something will alter everything.

Is there something about the 'Collection' selection column in the font palette (only visible when the palette is resized horizontally beyond 430 pixels.) Can that address style sheets?

You're right. In my workaround I hadn't considered the case of an object containing multiple styles. The selection inspector selects objects, not strings within text, which is what you'd need for a method that approximates real named styles.

Seems like a Send Feedback... feature request is in order.