Dear Omnigraffle folks,
Is there a way to find the distance between any two objects in a canvas in inches, cms or a discrete unit? I am trying to make several pairs of object be equidistant from each other and wonder if there is an easy way to do this. Currently I just eyeball the gridlines in between the objects - but this is a rough estimate at best.
Thanks for your time!
sj
Hi Sha,
To the first question, I don’t know a good way to measure the distance between objects, but when necessary I usually construct a rectangle between shapes and get the dimensions from its shape geometry.
For the second question, you can either make objects snap to gridlines or use the diagram layout to automatically lay out the objects. Be careful though, using the automatic layout can mess up the alignment of other shapes so make sure you have the shapes, you wish to align in a layer by them self. Also omnigraffle 5 had some difficulties undoing the diagram layout action.
Hope this helps!
There are a couple of ways to do this that may work in different situations.
First, turn on Smart Distance Guides. (Arrange>Guides>Smart Distance Guides). If objects are more-or-less aligned in one dimension, dimension lines will appear between them when those objects are equidistant in that dimension.
Second, connect objects a length-labeled line. There’s one in the Connections stencil that you can drag into your drawing. You can make one yourself by adding the length variable (<%length%>) as a label to any line. The units in the label are those set in the Units inspector under the Canvas Inspectors tab.
