[yawitz]

Maybe it's just due to my personal OG habits, but after the recent change (5.3) to the way smart guides and grid snapping interact, I've been having a harder time controlling accurate placement.

I have been working with a lot of bitmap assets in the canvas, which have dimensions that don't fit neatly on the grid, so I was relying on smart guides as much as the grid for precise alignment. Now, using the mouse, the grid seems to take precedence over the smart guides, which has been frustrating.

In the past, the smart guides seemed to take precedence more often, but I had the CMD-drag shortcut to temporarily reverse the smart guide setting, and that worked well for me. Now, with the grid snap seeming to take precedence, is there any shortcut that can do the same for temporarily disabling grid snapping? I find myself toggling grid snap off to get objects aligned, then toggling it back on when I'm done. It would be great if there was a faster method for this use case.

Cheers,
Mitch

[john.gersh]

How fast do you need the method to be? You can add a Snap to Grid button to the toolbar; that makes toggling pretty fast. According to the help there's a keystroke shortcut for it, but that doesn't seem to be implemented. Instead, you can add a custom keystroke shortcut in the Keyboard system preference pane, Keyboard Shortcuts tab. That's probably as fast as you can get for toggling snap. It might be nice have a keystroke-drag capability for ignoring the current snap setting (like option-dragging the end of a line to ignore magnets), but I don't think that's there right now.

[yawitz]

Thanks for confirming that I'm not missing anything. I'll freely admit this is more of an annoyance than a serious issue, but I do like having the "momentary disable" (keystroke-drag) feature for disabling smart guides (which is faster than having to go to the menus to toggle it off, then back on). I wish I had it for grid snapping.

Re:

Originally Posted by john.gersh

How fast do you need the method to be? You can add a Snap to Grid button to the toolbar; that makes toggling pretty fast. According to the help there's a keystroke shortcut for it, but that doesn't seem to be implemented...

I did already add the toolbar button, and there is in fact a shortcut for that (CMD-OPT-\) that works for me. But again, toggling it off, then on, is more annoying (to me, at least) than a momentary disable key.

Cheers,
Mitch

[john.gersh]

Interesting - I don't have cmd-opt-\ for toggling snap (OG Pro 5.3.2). It's in the help, but doesn't appear in the menu and doesn't work. As far as I can tell that combination is not overridden anywhere, though it can be turned on in Universal Access.

[yawitz]

I'm still running Snow Leopard. Are you running Lion? From the 5.3.1 release notes:

Universal Access on Mac OS X v10.7 has taken our existing keyboard shortcut for "Snap to Grid", this shortcut has been removed from OmniGraffle; it can be customized in System Preferences.

Is that it?

Cheers,
Mitch

[john.gersh]

I'm still running 10.6.8 (with supplemental update). Universal Access has taken over cmd-opt-\ there, too.

[yawitz]

Ah, you're right, I spoke to soon. I hadn't updated to 5.3.1 yet, so I misinterpreted the release note item as only pertaining to Lion users. I updated to 5.3.1, and it's now gone for me now. Sorry for the confusion.

I haven't had any success adding it back in via System Preferences (I need to look into that next). I tried adding CMD-OPT-\ there, which didn't work, but other combinations (e.g. CMD-SHIFT-G) did. Do you have any clues about what the rules are for legal shortcut overrides?

Cheers,
Mitch

[Brian]

Mitch - sorry for the confusion re: that release note. "Can be customized" was intended to mean "you can add a new/different shortcut" for that feature.

Alternatively, it *may* be possible to use System Preferences to assign a different shortcut to Universal Access and then customize OmniGraffle to use the one you were using before. You'll have to do both, though; otherwise Universal Access is going to get the keyboard event and prevent it from reaching us.

I didn't have sufficient time before my next meeting to verify that'll actually work, though, so apologies if it doesn't. ;-)

[john.gersh]

You can customize the shortcut in System Preferences. I should have checked the release noes before bringing this up (RTFRN).