Omnigraffle 7 Copy/Paste Problems

What is up with Omnigraffle 7 copy/paste? Any way to fix it?

I use many tools together. I copy from other sources and paste into Omnigraffle for mockups. Now I can’t copy/paste from Adobe Illustrator, Affinity Designer, iwork, etc. Now few of these work at all with OG, and if they do it pastes in all messed up.

I have found you can work around the AI issue with a drag, but it is annoying. The others, can’t fix.

What is going on? Is omnigraffle no longer built on Apples Quartz APIs?

Sorry about the trouble! The clipboard in OmniGraffle 6 used to accept images and did not have SVG support. In OmniGraffle 7 we added the ability to paste or import SVG format. In cases where the SVG import isn’t perfect, you will have better results by saving in any image format instead and placing that into OmniGraffle. We haven’t changed our clipboard, but we do now support more vector formats both on Place Image and on paste.

In Illustrator you can specify what format the external pasteboard uses. Have you tried changing the clipboard preferences in Illustrator? Since drag & drop does what you want, it’s likely possible to specify using that same format for copy/paste. Try the PDF format for the clipboard instead of AICB since the internal Illustrator clipboard is going to interpret the Vectors without having the internal styles instead of bringing in an image. The only issue I’ve heard about is with Illustrator, if you don’t use the PDF format for your clipboard, the styles defined in Illustrator do not copy over.

Affinity Designer copies as SVG according to their website. I’d suggest saving as any image format (PDF might be a good format to start with) instead of using copy/paste from Affinity Designer as an image would be much better than pasting in the vectors. I did not see the option to control what format the clipboard uses from Affinity Designer in my search. One workaround which might help if you need a small selection from a larger document is using Preview.app. Once you have copied the item, choose File -> New from Pasteboard (Command-N), then save as an image format.

It sounds like adding an option to accept only image formats from the clipboard on paste would be useful to consider for future OmniGraffle. If you’d like to send a feature request, or if there is anything else we can help with please choose Contact Omni from the help menu.

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