OmniGraffle Tip: Scaling with LinkBack

Martin Jaggi brought up a good point on the OmniGraffle mailing list: it would be nice to resize objects in OmniGraffle as if they were an image, not a set of objects. LinkBack makes this possible.

Say you have a nice bunch of objects in OmniGraffle you'd like to scale while having the text, stroke width, corner radii, and such scale along with them:

LinkBack scaling 1

If you just select them all and Shift-drag the corner handle, the lines stay the same width, the corner radii stay the same, and the font size stays the same; not quite what you want:

LinkBack scaling 2

But! If you instead select them and choose Copy As PDF from the Edit menu, you can paste a representation of all the objects as a single object:

LinkBack scaling 3

Then you can scale the PDF like a normal image; everything scales with it:

LinkBack scaling 4

Here's the cool part: because the PDF contains LinkBack data, you can double-click it to open an OmniGraffle window with your original objects! Edit them however you like, and when you hit Save, the PDF version updates!

LinkBack scaling 5