It confuses me to why there is still not a way to create a master stencil.
It’s quite a common feature/behaviour: should there be any change to a stencil, those changes propagate (update) to all stencil instances on all canvases throughout the document. The Master behaviour in Axure, or the Symbol behaviour within Illustrator or Sketch are good implementations of this.
From a UI perspective, the stencil behaviour could be easily defined within the Stencil Library inspector so ‘default’ would be the current behaviour, while choosing ‘master’ would invoke the above behaviour - allowing all replicated instances to propagate accordingly. It’ll save an incredible amount of time, especially where there are multiple instances of the same stencil which are prone to frequent changes.
I know LinkBacks (‘copy as pdf’) roughly facilitates this. But it’s a buggy and poor substitute. E.g. dimensions of the originating shapes/set of shapes are not retained if shadows or borders are used; the replicated assets are physically larger than their source (the master) which makes aligning up shapes extremely troublesome. Plus, using LinkBacks quickly becomes unmanageable within 20+ page OmniGraffle documents because it lacks a central, manageable repository.
Right now, I’m using Sketch and Indigo Studio as alternatives for larger wireframe sets. I’d jump back to OmniGraffle in an instant if this were to be implemented.
