One of the key strengths of Omni products is that when your work hits an Omni-bug, or a design limitation, you can reach for the Applescript duct tape, and script a work-around.

I have been surprised, however, to discover that doing this in the case of OmniGraffle often seems to uncover a bug in the duct tape itself.

In this case, the Ninjas confirm that there is an existing bug in their database which records a blind patch in the scripting of shadows. Shadow color, vector, and fuzziness are scriptable, but the 'shadow cast attribute' somehow got left out.

This means that you can't script the option between:

• 'Shadow behind all other objects in the same layer'
• 'Shadow immediately beneath this object'

A pity, because one really needs to be able to do this in the script above ...

As it is, one has to move the framing mask aside, manually set the option for the shadowed cut-out below, reposition the framing mask, and group the two.

Bugs in applescript are liable to get neglected by Omni's bug priority voting system. (A bit like arguing that fire extinguishers don't need to be maintained on the democratic grounds that not many people use them :-)

If, therefore, this bug does seem to affect your work-flow (or if you simply believe in maintaining fire extinguishers in good order, just in case) do send a brief bug fix request through Help > Send Feedback ...