The Inspectors sidebar contains five inspectors—Object, Type, Properties, Canvas, and Document—and the Stencils Library, which used to have its own floating palette in earlier versions of OmniGraffle. Inspectors are grouped by the type of content they govern. You can browse the various Inspector categories by clicking the icons along the top of the sidebar. Within each Inspector, you’ll find multiple, collapsable inspectors for changing the properties of an object.

To open an Inspector, hover over the title with the mouse, and then click on the disclosure triangle to open and use the inspector. To open one particular inspector (for example the Stroke inspector) and close any other open inspectors, Shift-Option-click on the disclosure triangle. To open or close all of the inspectors, Shift-Command-click on one of the disclosure triangles.

In all of the inspectors, you can click in a text field that contains a number, and then press the up or down arrow keys to increment or decrement the number. Also, once you click a circular rotation control, you can keep the mouse button held down while moving the pointer away from the control to gain more rotational precision.

Any color well can have its color dragged to an object on the canvas or to another color well. When you drag to an object, you can drop the color on the object’s stroke, fill, or text.

In places where you can enter measurements, such as in the Geometry inspector, values are shown in the current ruler units, or, if there is no unit scale, in the canvas units. You can, however, enter values in any units that are available in the ruler, such as miles or kilometers. As soon as you finish entering the value, OmniGraffle converts it to the correct units automatically.

You can also perform simple arithmetic and mix units. Add (+), subtract (−), multiply (*), or divide (/) numbers right in the input fields.

• Use the pop-up menu on the left side of the inspector to choose from the nine kinds of fill: Solid, Linear Blend, Radial Blend, Double Linear Blend, Double Radial Blend, Stipple, Marker, and Squiggle. No Fill is also available as an option for objects where transparency is desired.

• The blend rotation control becomes active when you choose a linear blend; enter a number of degrees in the field or drag the circular control to set the angle of the gradient. The blend position control becomes active when you choose a radial gradient; drag its crosshair to move the gradient’s center.

• Click the color well to choose the color of the fill.

• If you have chosen a two-color blend, you can click the swap button to exchange the two colors.

• If you choose a blend, two or three color wells become available. Click them to choose the colors to blend together.

• Drag the bias slider on the far right to shift a blend toward one side or the other.

You can also edit the fill color of a canvas itself using the Canvas Fill inspector.

• Use the dropdown menu to choose a single stroke, double stroke, freehand stroke, or no stroke at all.

• Click the color well to choose a color for the stroke.

• Enter a number in the Thickness field or use the keyboard arrows to choose how thick the stroke should be.

• The first of the three pop-up menus determines the stroke pattern (solid, dashed, dotted, and so on). The center pop-up menu determines how the stroke appears at its ends: The Butt option ends the line by cutting across its endpoint at an angle perpendicular to the line itself, while the Round and Square options let the line extend past its endpoint based on the stroke width. The third pop-up menu determines how the stroke appears at its corners: Miter creates a sharp corner, Round creates a soft corner, and Bevel creates a cut-off corner.

• Click the leftmost button to choose whether the selected object has a shadow, and if the shadow appears in front of objects or behind objects on the same layer. If you choose to let shadows appear in front of objects on the same layer, the ordering of objects matters; you can reorder objects with the Bring and Send commands in the Arrange menu.

• Enter a number in the blur field or use the keyboard arrows to choose how precise or blurry the shadow should be.

• Drag the crosshair in the offset control or enter numbers in the offset fields to set how far away from the object the shadow should fall.

• Click the color well in the upper-right to choose a color for the shadow; partially transparent black tends to work best.

• To change the shape to another, the upper right button provides a grid containing available shapes. It includes all of OmniGraffle’s built-in shapes plus all of the current canvas’s custom shapes (ones created with the pen tool or shape combinations).

• Use the Corner Radius field to set how round the corners of the shape should be; enter 0 for perfectly pointy corners.

• The three pop-up menus determine the style of the tail, middle, and head of the line. Use the tail and head menus to set the line endings. Use the middle menu to set how the line travels from its source to its destination: Straight for a line that takes the shortest possible path between points, Curved for a line that turns smoothly to pass through each point, Orthogonal for a line that always travels horizontally or vertically, or Bézier for a line with control points you can adjust with the selection tool.

• Use the fields below the tail and head menus to change the line ending sizes. Click the reverse button to swap the line’s source and destination points.

• Click Remove Midpoints to get rid of all points between the source and destination points.

• The Line Hops menu determines what the line should do when it crosses other lines; choose one of the hop types to make the line jump over or under other lines, or choose Ignore this line to prevent other lines from hopping over or under it. The hops depend on the ordering of the lines involved; you can reorder objects with the Bring and Send commands in the Arrange menu.

• Use the Image pop-up menu to set an image in the selected shape. Once an image is set, a Remove Image command appears in the menu.

• When you browse for an image file, you have the option of creating an alias (or “link”) to the image instead of adding the image to the OmniGraffle file itself. If you do this, the OmniGraffle document depends on the original image file; the alias will not work if you delete the image file or open the document on a different computer. If an object’s image comes from an alias, some extra commands become available in the Image pop-up menu: you can Open the original image file, Reveal the original file in the Finder, or stop using the alias and Embed a copy of the image in the OmniGraffle document.

• Another way to set an image is just to drag an image file from another application and drop it on the image well, or on the shape object itself.

• The first button displays the image at its natural aspect ratio, with a zoom level and position as set with the controls below. The second button makes the image stretch to fit inside the object. The third button makes the image tile indefinitely across the object.

• The positioning offsets are enabled if you are displaying the image at its natural aspect ratio, as set by the first of the three buttons above. You can type a positive or negative percentage, or just drag the image around in the image well to indicate the area you want.

• The zoom controls are available unless you are stretching the image to fit the shape. You can enter a zoom percentage, or just drag the slider, to make the image larger or smaller.

• You can make the image transparent and let the object’s fill show through by decreasing the value of the opacity field, or by dragging the opacity slider.

• To rotate the object, enter a degree value in the rotation field, or drag the circular control.

• The top two fields contain the X and Y (horizontal and vertical) coordinates for the selected objects; the value represents the distance between the canvas’s origin and the upper-left corner of the object (which might not be obvious if the object is rotated or flipped). If you have multiple objects selected, two hyphens (- -) appear in the fields that have different values. Enter a new X or Y value to move an object on the canvas.

• The next two fields contain the Width and Height values for the selected objects. If you have multiple objects selected, two hyphens (- -) appear in the fields that have different values. Enter a new width or height value to resize an object on the canvas.

• Click the flip buttons to reverse the object horizontally or vertically.

• Next to the flip buttons is a pop-up menu with the following options:

  • No scaling — by default, the objects you draw on the canvas are not scaled to any size or proportion.
  • Maintain Aspect Ratio — the objects you draw or resize are scaled proportionally. In addition, there are three additional aspect-related options:
    • Scale Stroke — scales the object’s stroke proportionally.
    • Scale Font — scales any text inside the object proportionally.
    • Scale Stroke and Font — scales the objects stroke and text proportionally.

If you have selected a line label, two additional controls become active:

Use the pop-up menu to set how the label’s text appears in relation to the line. Options include: Horizontal, Vertical, Parallel, Perpendicular, Independent, and Follows Path. Use the slider next to the pop-up menu to change the label’s position in relation to the line.

• The matrix of nine buttons on the left changes how the alignment buttons work. It represents all of the combinations between vertically aligning to the top, middle, or bottom, and horizontally aligning to the left, center, or right. If you want, for example, to align objects by their upper-right corners, click the upper-right button in the matrix.

• Next to the button matrix are the align buttons. Their icons change to reflect the state of the button matrix. Click the horizontal-align button to line up the selected objects horizontally. Click the vertical-align button to line up the selected objects vertically. The first object you selected stays where it is, and the other selected objects move to align with it. These buttons are only useful when you have at least two objects selected.

• Next to the align buttons are two spread buttons. Click the horizontal spread button to distribute the selected objects evenly between the leftmost and rightmost objects. Click the vertical spread button to distribute the selected objects evenly between the top and bottom objects. These buttons are only useful when you have at least three objects selected.

• To the right are two fields and their associated spacing buttons. Enter a value in the top field and click the horizontal spacing button to put the specified amount of horizontal space between the selected objects. Enter a value in the bottom field and click the vertical spacing button to put the specified amount of vertical space between the selected objects. These buttons are only useful if you have at least two objects selected.

• If Align to canvas is selected, the align and spread buttons consider the canvas edges as “objects” when arranging the selected objects. This makes it so that you can align objects to a canvas edge, or space objects evenly between the canvas edges.

• With the horizontal alignment buttons, you can align left, center, align right, or justify the text.

• Click the color well to choose a font color.

• There are three buttons for controlling what happens when the shape contains more text than can be contained within its bounds. You can choose to let the text overflow outside of the shape, to clip off the text that doesn’t fit inside the shape, or to resize the shape to make the text fit. If you choose resize, the object will only be manually resizable in the horizontal direction; it will resize vertically according to its text. Select the Wrap to shape checkbox to limit the text’s width to the limits set by the Text Offset settings below.

• There are three buttons for setting the vertical alignment of the text; choose to align to the top, middle, or bottom of the shape.

• On the right side are controls for setting the Kerning (automatic character spacing for ideal balance), Tracking (manual character spacing), Leading (distance between lines), and Margins (distance between text and the edges of the text area). These controls become enabled or disabled depending on other controls in the inspector, or the amount of text in the object.

• The Canvas Size fields control the width and height of the canvas. You can use any of the units available in the Ruler, or enter a number of pages.

• Select Size is multiple of printer sheets to make the edges of the canvas snap to the edges of pages. This prevents the canvas from ending in the middle of a page.

• If you select Auto-adjust the canvas size, the canvas will grow or shrink to fit the objects you create.

• When you print, if Print canvas on one printer sheet is selected, the canvas gets scaled up or down to fit a single piece of paper regardless of its size on the screen.

• The Orientation of pages can be portrait (vertical), landscape (horizontal), or can be taken from the settings in Page Setup.

Use the controls to the left of the Mask button to Manually Size, Stretch, or Tile the image you’ve placed. Use the grid of four fields to position the image from left, from top, sized horizontally, or sized vertically. Use the slider at the bottom of the inspector to change the image’s opacity.

The actual size of your diagram does not change when you change the units; it is merely measured differently. The ruler and the inspectors display measurements in whichever unit you select here.

Units marked with an asterisk (*) can be used as canvas units. This means that when you set up a Unit Scale (see the next section), only these units can be used on the left-side “actual size” part of the equation. Any kind of units can be used on the right-side “theoretical size” part of the scale equation.

If you choose Custom from the Scale pop-up, you can change the scale to suit the project you’re currently working on. For example, if you enter 1 cm = 1 m, 1 cm on the ruler now becomes 1 meter, objects on the canvas that were 2 cm wide are now 2 meters wide, and so on. The Units setting changes to match the second value in the equation.

You can also enter a ratio. For example, if you set a Custom Scale to 1:12, the ruler units stay the same, but objects on the canvas now claim to be 12 times larger than they were before you changed the scale.

If you already have a scale set up and you conver directly to a different one, the objects change their actual size on the canvas to fit the new scale. For example, imagine you are working in 1 cm = 1 m, and then you convert the scale to 2 cm = 1 m. The marks on the ruler become twice as far apart as they were, and the objects on the canvas, staying true to the ruler, grow twice as large on the screen. You can get a new scale without resizing the objects by choosing from the Reset Scale To: section of the Unit scale pop-up menu.

The two fields at the top of the inspector are where you can set the values for the Major and Minor Grid spacing, respectively:

• The Major Grid Spacing field determines how large each square of the main grid should be. Click the color well next to it to choose a color for the major grid.

• The Minor Grid Steps field determines how many minor grid squares should fit across one major grid square. For example, if your major grid squares are 100 pixels across, and you have 10 minor grid steps, your minor grid squares are 10 pixels across. Click the color well next to it to choose a color for the minor grid.

The checkboxes beneath the Major and Minor Grid spacing fields provide additional control over how the grid is used and its appearance:

• While the Snap to grid checkbox is selected, all objects fit themselves to the grid as you create or move them. (If you want to snap objects already on the canvas, use the Align To Grid button below.)

• Select Grid in front to make the grid visible in front of objects on the canvas.

• Select Show grid lines to show the Minor Grid lines on the canvas.

• Select Show major to make the heavier Major Grid lines visible as well.

• Select Print grid to include the grid when printing.

Use the Fill Type pop-up (the big button on the left) to select from one of four layout types: Hierarchical (the default), Force-directed, Circular, and Radial. The various controls within the Diagram Layout inspector change depending on which layout type you choose.

Hierarchical

The hierarchical layout creates layers of equally-ranked objects, extending in one direction.

Force-directed

The force-directed layout grows in semi-random directions from the center, rather than in one particular direction from the edge.

Circular

The circular layout tries to arrange sibling shapes in a circle around their parent.

Radial

The radial layout tries to arrange sibling shapes in arcs around their parent.

When you use a hierarchical layout:

• The Direction buttons change where the top level objects start, and which way to layer the lower level objects from there.

• The Rank Separation field controls how far away each level of objects should be from the next.

• The Object Separation field controls how far away each object should be from other objects on the same level.

When you use other layout methods:

• Connection lines can stretch and compress, but you can adjust their average length by dragging the Line Length slider.

• The Shape Repulsion slider determines how strongly the shapes try to avoid coming near one another. If the line length and shape repulsion are small enough, shapes can be made to overlap.

Finally, you can turn on Auto layout to make OmniGraffle distribute the objects on the canvas whenever the connections between them change.

Flat file

A flat file is a single file on the disk, with all of the attached images embedded within.

File package

A file package is actually a folder disguised as a single file, with all of the attached images rattling around loose inside.

In some technical cases, it might be desirable to use one type or the other; if you don’t even know why this should matter, it’s safe to stick with the Automatic setting.

Normally OmniGraffle documents are “property list”–based text files. If you turn on Compress on disk, your file is instead saved in a binary format that takes up less space on the disk but whose innards can’t be read by scripts or text editors. If you don’t need to open an OmniGraffle document with a text editor, just go ahead and compress your files. This won’t hurt anything; it just makes the filesize a wee bit smaller.

All of this data is made available to OS X’s Spotlight searching feature, to help you find the diagram you’re looking for.

• Navigate through the hierarchy of your stencil collection using the back and forward buttons.

• Enter something in the Search field to find stencils whose names match, or stencils containing objects whose text or notes match.

• Select a stencil in the list to see its contents; select a whole folder to see the contents of all the stencils inside.

• With a stencil or folder selected, use the three buttons to the right of the search field to change how the stencils are displayed in the sidebar: as a condensed cluster, a table, or a list with previews and metadata.

• If you don’t need the entire object, but just one or all of its styles, drag a style from the style tray to an object in your document.

To use a stencil, just drag it from the Stencil Library and drop it anywhere on the canvas. A copy of the object is made and the original remains in the Stencil Library, so take as many copies as you need. You can do the same sort of selection tricks that you can do on a canvas, such as Command-clicking or -dragging a rectangle to select multiple objects, or Option-dragging an object to make another copy.

To search your stencils, type in the Search field at the top of the Inspector sidebar. OmniGraffle sifts through your stencils to help you find the object of your desire. Stencils that match appear in the special Search Results section of the stencil list. Normally, if any object on a stencil matches, then all objects on that stencil appear in the results. When searching from within a folder or stencil, however, the search field acts as a filter that only shows objects matching the filter text.

To make a new stencil, choose File ▸ New Resource ▸ New Stencil from the menu bar. You can edit the document that appears just like you would edit a normal OmniGraffle diagram. A preview of the stencil appears in the stencil window as you work. Once the stencil looks just how you want it, choose File ▸ Save (Command-S).

To edit a stencil, open it in the Resource Browser (Shift-Command-N). Then edit and save the stencil just like a normal OmniGraffle document.

The isolated chit on the left represents all of the styles applied to the selected object, while the rest of the chits represent each of the styles applied to the object, such as fill, stroke, image, shadow, shape, font, and text position. Drag any of these chits to another object, to a group in the Selection inspector, or to a tool in the tool palette, to copy the style there.

If you select more than one object, only the styles that those objects have in common appear in the style tray.

You can use a combination of ruler guides and OmniGraffle’s Smart Guides to position and perfectly align objects on the canvas. To add a ruler guide to your canvas, click and hold on either the top or left ruler bar and then drag a guide onto the canvas. The guides you drag in are bright pink, so they are easy to recognize. There’s no limit to the number of guides you can drag onto the canvas, so don’t be shy.

By default, the very upper-left corner of a canvas is known as its origin (that is, the point from which all ruler measurements originate, and the coordinates are 0,0). To change the origin, click and drag the origin from the corner where the rulers meet. (Alternatively, you can enter Origin values in the Units Canvas inspector.) The coordinates in the Geometry inspector are based on this origin point.

To reset the origin to the 0,0 position, just click on the origin point between the two rulers. Click the origin point again and the origin point will change to its previous position.

When editing text, tab stops appear on the ruler and text formatting controls appear above it. You can style text, change the spacing and alignment, or drag tab stops to and from the ruler.

When you aren’t editing text, the area above the ruler—the Inspector Bar—contains controls for editing basic attributes of selected objects:

1. Horizontal Object Position — the object’s position from the left origin point.
2. Vertical Object Position — the object’s position from the top origin point.
3. Object Width — the object’s width.
4. Object Height — the object’s height.
5. Shadow Casting Style — set the shadow style for the object; for additional control over shadows, see the Shadow inspector.
6. Shape Style — this pop-up lets you quickly select a shape style for the selected object.
7. Stroke — choose a stroke style for the selected object.
8. Stroke Color — choose a color for the stroke.
9. Stroke Thickness — set the width (or thickness) for a stroke.

To open a template, choose File ▸ Resource Browser (Shift-Command-N) and select one of the available Templates.

When you select a template in the Resource Browser, you’ll notice that the right side of the window reveals a little more detail about the template. If you find that you’re using a particular template often, click Make Default to specify the selected template as the default.

After you set a default template, OmniGraffle bypasses the Resource Browser and uses the default template for any new documents you create. If you don’t want to use the default template, just open the Resource Browser (Shift-Command-N) and choose something else.

You can also create a new template or edit a template that belongs to you. When you create an OmniGraffle template, everything about it is preserved, from the canvas size and grid layout, to layers, to visibility of extras, to the automatic layout settings.

To create a template, choose File ▸ New Resource ▸ New Template from the menu bar, and then choose an existing template to use as a starting point. Set up the document exactly the way you want it, then save it to the Templates folder that OmniGraffle has already set up on your Mac. Once saved, your template is available in the Templates section of the Resource Browser.

Two features that all of the preference panes offer are the ability to Reset () any changes you’ve made to the defaults settings, and quick access to Help () documentation for that pane.

Options include:

Startup

Select Create new document if nothing else is open to start with a new document when you aren’t making OmniGraffle remember open documents, or if there were no open documents the last time you quit.

New Documents

Select Open Resource Browser to be presented with a window for choosing from a variety of file sources each time you create a new document. Select Use Template, and choose your default template, if you’d rather bypass the browser. Either way, you can always get to the browser with the Resource Browser command in the File menu.

Text Editing

Decide how you would like the Return and Tab keys to behave while you are editing an object’s text. Whichever way you choose, you can hold Option while pressing the key to do the reverse instead.

Selection

Small objects get smaller versions of the handles that appear when you select them; if you really like the small ones, you can click Always use small selection handles to see them all the time.

When you click in the middle of a shape object that isn’t filled with an image or color, you might want to select the object or you might want to select whatever is behind it. Use the Click through objects with no fill checkbox to indicate which you prefer.

Multi-Touch

If you’d like to use Multi-Touch gestures with a trackpad on a compatible MacBook Pro or other device, click the checkbox here.

Help Tags

When you move or resize an object, a little help tag appears to let you know the object’s new location and size exactly. That is, unless you find it annoying and turn it off here.

Full Screen

Choose whether to display the toolbar when in full screen mode.

Inspectors

Choose whether to hide inspectors that don’t apply to the currently selected object.

Preferences Reset button

Each preference pane has a Reset button in the lower left. Clicking this button returns all of the settings on the pane to their defaults. To reset all settings on all preference panes, hold Option while clicking the Reset button.

You can drag tools around in the list to reorder them in the palette. Move the separator line to change where the expansion button appears in the toolbar; move it to the end of the list to get rid of the button entirely.

Double-click a tool’s hot key to change it. A hot key activates a tool for only as long as you hold the key down; once you release the key, the previously active tool becomes active again.

Inspect a tool

By default, in order to inspect a tool you need to Option-click it. If you prefer, you can make it take just one normal click to inspect a tool.

Keep tool active

By default, it takes one click to temporarily activate a tool, and two clicks to make a tool “stick” in an active state. You can choose to make tools stick after only one click, or make it so that every tool selection is temporary.

Line Creation

When you are creating a line, clicking an object will always connect the line to the object and end the line. If you click in an empty area of the canvas, though, you might want to end the line there or you might want just to add a point there and continue creating the line. Use this preference setting to indicate which you prefer.

Line Editing

When you double-click a line, you might prefer to add a new point to the line, or you might prefer to add a label. Choose one; Option-double-click will do the other.

You can specify whether OmniGraffle will automatically check for updates Daily, Weekly, or Monthly, or if you’re really impatient, you can click Check for Updates Now to see if we’ve issued a new release. This is particularly helpful if you have Check for updates set to check Monthly and you’ve recently heard that a new update is available.

If Check for updates is turned on, you will be notified when there is a new version of OmniGraffle ready for you to download and enjoy. Click Check for Updates Now to look for the newest version manually; you can also choose OmniGraffle ▸ Check for Updates from the menu bar.

Additionally, you can opt in to Include system information when OmniGraffle checks for updates. This sends basic information about your system to us, which we only use to better support various systems with future releases of OmniGraffle. And, as the Update preferences pane says: “We promise to never use your information for nefarious purposes,” which means that the information we receive about your system stays with us and is only used by us as we work on future updates of OmniGraffle.