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Can I get a manual for Omnigraffle for ipad?
 
I still think help is lacking for the button to the right of the undo. I do not know what it is called and there are a few settings in there that are not intuitive to work out (or spend time to figure out).

Help for this part of OG would be great.

Thanks
 
The help for Using the Toolbar calls the button you mentioned the Diagram Tool, but then confusingly the documentation that describes how to use it calls it the Contents Popover. The latter seems like a better choice, to me.

Is OG for iPad your first exposure to OmniGraffle? I can see how that page might be a bit frustrating if you don't already have an understanding of what OmniGraffle canvases and layers do. In the general case, a document is a stack of one or more canvases, with each canvas having one or more layers. You can only view one canvas at a time, but its layers are transparent, and you can choose which layers you wish to display. If you think of a canvas + layers as an opaque backing with a stack of transparent plastic sheets between you and the backing, that's a reasonable starting place. An example of how you might use the layer functionality would be planning the layout of a room. One layer would have the floor plan, just showing the position of walls, windows, and doors. You would lock that layer after drawing it, to avoid making any inadvertent changes. You could use a set of layers to show alternative furniture placements, setting only one of the layers to be visible at a time. Another set of layers might show the effect of different rug sizes. Website designers use a canvas for each different page in the website design, instead of having a stack of different documents to corral.

It's important to understand that you only can make changes in the active layer of the current canvas, and you'll know which layer is active by the presence of a small pencil to the left of the layer name. There's also a square box that shows up to indicate in which layers the objects you have selected (if any) reside. To the right of the layer name, you get the buttons for sharing a layer between canvases, controlling the visibility of a layer, and locking the layer from being changed.

The third button along the top allows you to select individual graphics and change their front to back ordering (items higher in the list are in front of those lower in the list) or delete them. I don't use this very often, but if you need to do that sort of thing, it beats tapping all over the document to select objects, tapping and holding and tapping More... in the popup menu to get to the Bring to Front or Send to Back choices!

The fourth button is the object filter, and this is really very handy. It allows you to quickly select all of the objects of a given style so that you can do something to them all simultaneously. Say you're doing an org chart, and someone decides that instead of black rectangles, all the boxes should be green rectangles with rounded corners. No need to recreate everything, just bring up the object filter, tap on the symbol corresponding to your boxes to select them all, then use the popover menu to set the shape and stroke accordingly. The buttons along the bottom of the filter control which properties should be ignored or used to decide whether two similar but not identical objects should be lumped together. For example, the leftmost button is the fill option; if it is blue, then two rectangles which have different fill will be treated as two different kinds of objects, each with their own icon in the object list, but if it is black, then those rectangles would be lumped together as a single object type.

I hope this helps. A lot of this won't stick until you spend some time just playing around with it. Then reread the documentation, and repeat. Even with OmniGraffle for iPad's cut-down feature set, there's a lot to absorb! You're not going to be successful just reading a how-to document and immediately trying to produce polished diagrams, any more than you're going to be reading a book about photography or playing the piano.
 
Hi, thanks for this. I am new to OG and only for iPad as well.

I need to spend more time with the app and like you said I need to keep coming back to your explanation to fully grasp it.

Thanks again!
 
 


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