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OmniGraffle Tip: Scaling with LinkBack

by Bill Van Hecke on September 12, 2006

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

 

Comments

Wouldn't it be natural to have this sort of resizing behaviour if the objects were grouped?

Cameron Hayne

09.12.06 8:58 AM

It should be natural Cameron, but it isn't. Text, for example, will not scale down (unless you follow this method).

Davezilla

09.13.06 4:04 AM

Thanks, I was wondering how to get this to work.

Matthew Barker

09.13.06 10:36 AM

Perhaps there are two kinds of 'natural'. I can certainly imagine circumstances could arise where I wanted to resize a set of grouped objects but where I didn't want properties like line-thickness to change, and that is equally natural to me ... in fact I have the feeling I've been there already.


I think this is a brilliant way of going about the resizing. Using “Paste as PDF” means that what is conceptually a single graphic can be resized with all its properties adjusting; where you conceptually still have a group of elements all of which you want to resize but without changing their properties, it can be done the normal way.


Mark

Mark

09.13.06 1:09 PM

Once I figured out how Linkback worked (with the Paste as PDF automatically making a Linkback), I've been using it in every one of my projects for *exactly* the reason outlined above.


My prior workflow involved creating an OGP document (letter sized), with multiple canvases, each canvas being a wireframe page (I'm an IA). I'd then “export all objects” as PDF. I'd repeat this for every canvas. Then I'd pop it into a new OGP tabloid document for annotation.


If I had to make revisions, I'd open up the original document, make the changes, and re-export, and re-import. Now, I just Copy-As PDF into the annotated doc, and make my revisions via double click from the Linkback functionality. This has saved *soooo* many hours of mindless production work.

CM Harrington

09.27.06 4:13 AM
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