OmniGraffle as a Acrobat Killer

[Karl Kuehn]

	I have been making a series of PDF's and after battling with 
Illustrator and Acrobat for a while, I retreated back to OmniGraffle 
and things went much faster. The layout guides are so helpful that 
things just fell into place in many cases. And with PDF export of 
vector objects, things went great. I think that with just a few 
changes/additions OmniGraffle could be a strong contender in making PDF 
Forms, and possibly an Acrobat Killer (not Reader... the Writer):

Basics:

		Forms elements, so that fill-in PDF forms can be made (checkbox, text 
area, etc). I had to retreat to

		Shape labels "outside the box". I am thinking of checkboxes here, but 
this is also a general request. There are a lot of times that I want to 
put a label on an object, but it is too small for the label to fit 
inside it. My thought would be to use the dial (the same one from the 
Geometry inspector) for positioning along with a control for distance. 
I have some ideas about how this could work if anyone is interested.

		Have the auto-align snap to joining edges. I am not looking for it to 
actually join the edges, but to snap-to exactly when the edges are 
overlapped. This would be the cheap way of building tables (but would 
be useful in many more cases). I can see cases where people would want 
things either close, or with the double line, so this would have to be 
disable-able like the rest of the auto-align features.

		If one object in a selection is fixed, and you align things, move the 
rest of the objects to align to it, even if it is in the opposite 
direction of usual alignment travel. Play around with FileMaker Pro's 
version of this, OG's is close, but I think it could take that next 
step. I do have to say that being able to choose the alignment point is 
a big win!

Advanced:

		Extend the action system to allow for form scripting (add things up, 
simple checks, etc).

		Have the auto-align work not just for centers, but for edges. This is 
another idea that would be useful for more than this. But would make 
aligning text areas much easier.

		Flow text within non-square shapes. I realize that this is much more 
of a page layout program thing, but its addition could make this a 
winning combination for much more complex projects... besides, this 
sort of thing is done in web-pages... *hint* *hint*

	I think that if the OmniGroup decided to add this focus to 
OmniGraffle, they could compete with Acrobat's $250 price tag for most 
users. After all, the MacOS X allows most people to make "good enough" 
PDF's from most any application, the only thing missing is a good easy 
way of making forms. I think that OG is 90% of the way there as is.

			Karl Kuehn
				larkost at softhome.net