[ggaudrea]

I am a registered owner of OmniGraffle 4 standard. I wanted to create a document with multiple pages and that didn't seem to be possible. It seems to be only a feature in OminiGraffle 4 Pro. I went to your web site and it seems that I can upgrade to OmniGraffle 5 and that has "multiple canvases"

This seems to work, however there is no way to create a master canvas. Your documentation is wrong. It says that you can create a master canvas by selecting one from the list and copying it. There is no list of master canvases.

Checking your forums there seems to be some discussion over something called "Shared Layers" This also does not work in OmniGraffle 5.

So, I'm completely confused. How do I create a document with a master canvas that I can use as a basis for other canvases? If this feature has been removed then you need to update the documentation to remove this and add documentation regarding your "Shared Layers"

This is a simple task and it's really frustrating that I can't get this working.

Thanks.

[Brian]

I'm sorry for the confusion this is causing - are you having trouble with the PDF of our printed manual, or with the help menu content?

If the latter, it sounds like you have multiple copies of OmniGraffle installed on your machine. Unfortunately, the built-in help viewer gets confused fairly easily, which results in (for example) the OmniGraffle 4 help being displayed in OmniGraffle 5. That sort of sounds like what's happening to you.

If it is, this page will show you how to correct the problem:
http://www.thexlab.com/faqs/helpviewer.html

Does that help? Again, very sorry for the confusion this caused.

[ggaudrea]

No, the confusion turns out to be this:

Upgrading to Omnigraffle 5 gives you multiple canvases, but not master canvases. Master canvases no longer exist and are now implemented via "shared Layers," which are Pro-only. It was quite unclear (we just bought 3 copies of OG5 standard) from the feature chart that while we get multiple canvases, they've been crippled and we can't use this very important feature of canvases.

While I understand the standard/pro offering is necessary, I think that such a basic feature like this should really be in standard. Just my 2 cents.

Yes, and my comment with regards to the help is due to Leopard searching both OmniGraffle 4 and 5 for info.

[Brian]

Sorry for the confusion there - multiple canvases and master canvases were both pro-only features in 4, as well. Multiple canvases got moved to Standard, but shared layers involves a lot more code, so it stayed in pro. We didn't really mean to 'cripple' anything.

I'll see if we can clarify the website.

If it's any consolation, you actually save yourself five cents if you upgrade to 5 pro by upgrading to 5 standard, then upgrading that to pro. (When the two $.95 purchases add up...)