[Joel]

We've introduced new behavior to the way that lines connect to shapes in OmniGraffle 5.3, currently this behavior is off by default to preserve appearance for legacy and iPad documents, but this thread is here to show you how to enable the new line styles and to illustrate why you might want to check it out.

(Those of you who downloaded and installed the release candidate have already been exposed to this new behavior, the release notes have the command line defaults to turn it back on, as well as in this post.)

If you would like to enable the new line behavior works, paste the following in Terminal:

"defaults write com.omnigroup.OmniGrafflePro UseOldBezierPathLayout NO" (if you are running OmniGraffle Professional, minus the quotes)

"defaults write com.omnigroup.OmniGraffle UseOldBezierPathLayout NO" (if you are running the Standard version of OmniGraffle, minus the quotes)

"defaults write com.omnigroup.OmniGrafflePro.MacAppStore UseOldBezierPathLayout NO" (if you are running OmniGraffle Professional purchased in the Mac App Store, minus the quotes)

"defaults write com.omnigroup.OmniGraffle.MacAppStore UseOldBezierPathLayout NO" (if you are running the Standard version of OmniGraffle purchased in the Mac App Store, minus the quotes)

Of course, if you replace NO with YES you can go back to the old way that lines behave if you don't like the new way.

So, what does it all mean? We'll take it step by step:

Line Endings and their Location

Typically lines desire to point towards the center of a shape that they're connected to (unless snapping to a nearby magnet), yet the endpoints of a selected line show their termination at the edge of the shape.



The new behavior will show the selected line's endpoints at the center of the shape, yet any arrowheads or line endings will still render at the edge of the shape (unless the line is connected to a magnet inside the shape and the line is in front.



There isn't any functional difference here between the old and the new, however the new behavior makes it distinctly easier to have a Bezier line loop around to connect to the same shape without having to make any midpoints, etc.