Is there a way to shrink the canvas to the size of a placed image, or do I have to handle this in the Export Area settings while exporting the finished picture?
- Yes, there is. Inspector/Canvas/Auto-adjust canvas size.
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You might have to fiddle around a bit, with the other settings on that Inspector, to remove items that conflict with your intent. But doing what you want is definitely easy to do.
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As well, watch your FileMenu/PageSetup/PageSize and Scale.
- Separately, the Export/SelectedObjects is an alternative. But that is meant for other uses.
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Wouldn’t be Eindhoven, would it ?
In Omnigraffle 6.6 it is called Auto-size canvas, but I guess that’s the same. Nothing happens when I check that box, though. And I don’t know what to do in the Page setup dialog to make auto-size have effect.
That means:
- In Inspector/Canvas:
- Size is a multiple of printer sheets = OFF
- Auto-adjust the canvas size = ON
- Print canvas on one printer sheet = ON
- Then there are issues with the version. OG4 was great. With OG5, they removed features (eg. Scale in the Inspector/Canvas) and broke functions (numerous). With OG6, there were more removals, more broken function, bugs of a new order of magnitude. It is so buggy, I need my horse to drive it, therefore I cannot use it.
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The above are exact labels for OG5
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You need to figure out what to do in OG6.
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And don’t be surprised if they have removed the feature, or broken the function.
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in OG5 FileMenu/PageSetup/PageSize & Scale do not affect your intent, but in OG6 they well may.
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Then there are items that are hidden, not visible, in the diagram, that is of your own creation, that unintentionally affect the auto-page-sizing. This is decidedly a bug (for sane people) but the insane call it a “feature”.
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Check that there are no objects at (X, Y) coordinates that are beyond the (X, Y) coordinates that you wish the page size to be.
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Then there is another raft of bugs that fall squarely into the SharedLayers category. I do not have a problem with an insane developer, but I do have a problem when that insanity is forced upon me.
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If you use the madness known as SharedLayers, and you have such layers in your page, then you have to check that there are no objects in SharedLayers at (X, Y) coordinates that are beyond the (X, Y) coordinates that you wish the page size to be.
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You may not wish to delete the SharedLayers, altogether, so you may have to create a new canvas; move the SharedLayers there; then delete them from the target canvas; etc.
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Or you may have to delete the SharedLayers altogether (Omni has a private definition of Delete, which you have to work out). Look for Delete all copies of … when you right-click on a SharedLayer.
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The exercise will be complicated by the layers or SharedLayers being (in the Show Canvas Toolbar/Canvas/[Shared]Layer settings):
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visible (Show/Hide current layer)
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printed (Make current layer printing/nonprinting)
Hence, my advice that you have to play the fiddle and dance the jig, in order to get the darn thing to do what you want. This is how insane developers get to control the user community, by validating their insanity.
If there are features from earlier versions of OmniGraffle that you’d like to see restored, or bugs you’d like to see fixed, right now would be a very good time to test drive OmniGraffle 7 and send us feedback on what could be better. Thanks!
Thanks, @GraffleGuru, for your detailed answer a while ago. I couldn’t get your second answer either to work, though. Maybe it was just a misunderstanding from the beginning. What I was hoping for was a method to automatically shrink the canvas to the size of the pasted image. According to The Omni Group support that is not possible, instead I will have to specify the canvas size manually.
Apart from this, Omnigraffle 6 works fine for me, but you are apparently doing more advanced things. Hopefully feedback to The Omni Group will make Omnigraffle 7 a better product even for you.
Well, first let me say, I have been using OG for decades. Second, up to about 2007, I used to get Support from Omni. Since then, they do not provide support, they provide reasons for not providing support. They could not do a single thing with the OG 5 bugs. OG 6 is a total disaster, the OG 5 bug list squared. And now with OG 7 they openly advertise that they are getting the user community to perform their unit and integrity testing for them. So they have lost it as a software company. The company that built itself on OG 4, and the one that selfies its builds, are from different planets.
Now for the Auto-adjust the canvas size feature itself, based on my experience with hundreds of documents, some over 100 pages:
- Auto-adjust the canvas size works perfectly in OG 4.
- Auto-adjust the canvas size works perfectly in OG 5.
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But it is buggy.
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And it has features removed.
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And the filesize has quadrupled.
- OG 6 is (a) so buggy that you need a horse to drive it (b) has features removed. I tested it for a while but gave up in disgust. It is not a useable product.
- I have not tested the Auto-adjust the canvas size feature in OG 6.
- If the non-support-reasoners are now saying that that feature “is not possible”:
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I would say on the one hand, that is yet another great loss, both to the customer base, and to future income for Omni, because it worked well in OG 4 and OG 5.
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But on the one hand, that is no surprise, because they keep removing features. At the rate the developer-bots are going, the app will soon be measured in kilobytes and the filesize in gigabytes.
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In any case, I can’t understand why they have a check-box with the words “Auto-size canvas” next to it, in the Inspector/Canvas dialog:
Maybe they are perfecting a New Feature, that of a check-box that has no function attached to it. I have to admit, that is brilliant. The testing of that could go on for years. The communications for that could go on for centuries:
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Customer (eg. you at the outset of this thread): Guys, this check-box doesn’t work
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Non-support-bot: No, it works perfectly
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Customer: No it doesn’t
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Non-support-bot: No, it does
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A century or two later (we did put men on the moon, in 1969, using kilobyte software)
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Non-support-bot: See, it is not supposed to work. Therefore, it works perfectly.
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Customer (eg. you at the end of this thread): Oh, ok, I will just adjust the pagesize manually
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Customer (eg. me): I will stick to software that does what it says it does, OG 4
It is training the customer base, to accept the schizophrenia of the developer-bot-team, as “normal:”.
That’s very much a bug: our apologies; I’ll see if I can track it down.
(It does work as expected when “Size uses printer pages” is also checked, but that checkbox should certainly also work when your size isn’t using printer pages.)
Thank you. But what does ”work as expected” mean? Does it really shrink the canvas to the size of a pasted image smaller than the canvas, which is what I was hoping to find a way to do, or does it only expand the canvas to have room for an image that is bigger (which I manage to achieve, and which in many cases would be more desirable)?
Yes, it shrinks the canvas to the smallest size that can fit around your graphics. With the “Size uses printer pages” checkbox turned on the smallest it can shrink the canvas is to 1 page x 1 page. But as you drag your graphics around the canvas, you’ll see it grow to larger numbers of pages (if your graphics go off the existing set of pages) and then shrink back (if you drag them back onto the first page). It’s supposed to grow and shrink when the checkbox is turned off, too.
