[Ken Case]

Originally Posted by AnnOnemouse

But OmniGraffle's stock-in-trade is vector graphics, and the inability to read SVG, EPS, vector-PICT, or as far as I can tell, *any* standard vector graphics format is a complete deal-breaker.

OmniGraffle has native support for PDF, EPS and Vector PICT: you should be able to drag any of these vector images directly onto a canvas (just as you might drag a stencil object or bitmap image).

OmniGraffle Professional can also import vector graphics from Visio XML documents (but not from Visio's proprietary binary format).

Don't get me wrong, the drawing tools are nice, but if you want to create serious vector art, this is not the tool of choice; it's a magnificent layout and idea tool, but don't try to make your professional artist use it every day.

Our artist did most of his drawing using Adobe Illustrator when he was building the Gardening stencil. (Of course, that was before we added native support for Bezier curves in shapes in OmniGraffle 4, so the only way to do arbitrary scaleable curves was to author them using another vector graphics application.)

Someone please tell me I'm wrong, and that vector graphics can be copied and pasted from Inkscape (didn't work for me),

Inkscape doesn't work because it produces SVG, and while OmniGraffle Professional exports to SVG it doesn't yet import from it. (We keep expecting Apple to add SVG support to the operating system itself, since they helped define the SVG 1.0 standard. But obviously that hasn't happened yet.)

imported from a PDF written from OpenOffice (layers came out unaligned, fill patterns incorrect),

I'm not sure what the problem might have been with OpenOffice's PDF; does it render differently in OmniGraffle than it does in, say, Preview?

imported from an Interface Builder file (anyone tried this?),

I'm not quite sure what sort of vector drawing you would expect to get out of an Interface Builder document; OmniGraffle Professional does import them (if you have the developer tools installed), but it just graphs the connections between the objects in the document (as opposed to trying to preserve any sort of vector graphics from the interface).

or any other repeatable process.

The vector format we recommend is PDF: we leverage Mac OS X's built-in support for PDF (which is the basis of Mac OS X's graphics and printing systems), so anything that renders in Preview should render just as well in OmniGraffle (except that we make no attempt to render multiple pages).

If you're seeing problems when you open your PDF in Preview, then it sounds like you've found a bug in the authoring software (or possibly in Mac OS X itself) that should be reported to the appropriate party. If you're seeing a problem with PDF in OmniGraffle that you don't see in Preview, please let us know by sending feedback from the Help menu (or by sending email to omnigraffle@omnigroup.com).

Hope this helps!