[Joel]

Illustrator and the other Adobe apps will only scale text in a shape when resizing using their palettes and not when manually resizing the shape with the mouse; Lineform uses modifier keys to do so (and modifier keys are scarce in OmniGraffle right now as they are used for things like object rotation, etc.).

We're thinking about making a setting in the Geometry Inspector or some similar spot so it would be a property of an object, this of course will take a good deal of usability testing going forward.

[Stokestack]

Hi Joel.

"Illustrator and the other Adobe apps will only scale text in a shape when resizing using their palettes and not when manually resizing the shape with the mouse..."

I'm afraid I have to contradict you there. I just tried it in Illustrator CS4, and the text resizes as expected. This has also always been true in Corel Draw and undoubtedly Freehand way back when.

As far as other comments: I don't think making arbitrary distinctions between different types if illustration apps is useful here. OmniGraffle is for creating illustrative diagrams for visual consumption. The fact is that you probably don't know exactly how large a diagram is going to be when you start it. But you probably do know how much you want to put on one page.

The result is that you're going to wind up resizing the whole thing in many (if not most) cases. I just don't see why people tolerate the tedium of resizing text over and over again separately.

A method commonly used by other apps is to tag text as "artistic" or "paragraph" text. When resizing the bounding box on the text itself, artistic text changes size while paragraph text merely changes the size of the text area. In the OmniGraffle scenario, you could flag text as resizing with its shape or not (with a global default selectable by the user). It could default to the current behavior, so there'd be essentialy zero impact if the user didn't go looking for the option.

Seems pretty simple from a UI perspective. Select text, right-click to change properties, make it resize with the object.

[Joel]

Interesting, Illustrator has different behavior for its text tool -- A single click will create an object where the text scales, however using the text tool to scribe out an area will have the opposite behavior.

That said, I could easily counter the argument that when making diagrams in OmniGraffle, one might need to add more text to a node; in those cases where the node is not large enough to accommodate the text, one might wish to resize it and certainly not scale the text (this applies when making objects smaller as well).

[Stokestack]

Originally Posted by Joel

Interesting, Illustrator has different behavior for its text tool -- A single click will create an object where the text scales, however using the text tool to scribe out an area will have the opposite behavior.

Yeah, both Illustrator and Corel Draw use this method to switch between "artistic" and "paragraph" text. A switch for this in OmniGraffle would pretty much appease everybody.