How to use a text editor to create omnigraffle document?

So I’ve been poking around trying to create an omnigraffle document in a text editor (TextWrangler). I started out creating and saving a document in omnigraffle containing a single circle. Unfortunately, when I edit the file in TextWrangler I cannot open it in omnigraffle anymore! I tried removing and adding back a single character, so that there would basically be no change at all; still I’m presented with the error message “The document “name_of_the_file” could not be opened.”.

I think the error is caused because omnigraffle checks the modification date of the file, creates a hash-value of it and compares it to the string value under “NSPaperName” (which to me appears to be a hash value of some sort).

Does anybody know how this hash value is generated or if there’s something that I’m missing? I would really like to use omnigraffle for this, but as of now I have been forced to continue the work using MS Visio XML file format and importing it to omnigraffle.

Cheers
Jannik

Rather than attempting to build an OmniGraffle document by hand, have you considered writing a DOT file and importing it into OmniGraffle?

Thanks man! That’s actually a very good idea! Although I had heard about graphwiz, I really didn’t know what it did until I followed your link. Also I didn’t know that OG supported the .dot format.

I still do think that it is a shame that I have to use another format to do this…