Greetings,
OmniGraffle had an update this morning and now the crayon color selection tool is absent. Is it squirreled away somewhere that I may re-enable it? I truly do not need four different ways to not be able to choose the same colour twice. I find the wheel, sliders and such all but unusable. I just need something simple for selecting colours.
Thank you
Ad Astra Per Aspera,
KevinIs your Mac currently running macOS 10.13.6 High Sierra? If so, the Colored Pencils tab is disabled by default for this specific version of macOS in OmniGraffle 7.8.2 and later. This avoids a kernel panic affecting some fairly specific configurations.
Here’s a link with more specifics on why we did this and what actions you can take to resolve it.
How do I enable the Colored Pencils tab in the Color Picker on macOS High Sierra 10.13.6?
The enable-colored-pencils link changed the setting, but the crayons still display a a long list, instead of a box of crayons. Next suggestion?
If this problem still has not been resolved for you see my response to a similar inquiry from another poster. If you are not content with the list of colors, you can fake the Pencil tab by using the Swatch Drawer at the bottom of the Colors panel.
The Swatch Drawer has different behavior than it did prior to macOS 10.13 High Sierra, although I believe from other online discussions that it has returned to the behavior to which those of us that use the Swatch Drawer have grown accustomed in macOS 10.14 Mojave. (I really need to get my new backup drives installed and upgrade to Mojave. ☺️)
Anyway, this is how you can set up a pseudo-Pencils tab. First you need to have a either a clean Swatch Drawer or stored colors in your Swatch Drawer in multiples of 12; that will make sense later. If you have colors in the Swatch Drawer that you want to keep that are not in multiples of 12, you will need to create a custom color palette that is a good idea anyway for colors you have deemed mission critical. To create a custom color palette,
Select the Color Palettes tab in the Colors panel.
Click the Action menu (⚙︎) and select New.
You should see a new unnamed palette. To the right of the Search field you will see buttons to add [+] or delete [-] custom colors, and in the scroll list the color from the large color well in the swatch drawer will be the first item in your custom color palette as an unnamed color. If you do not want that color, select and delete it.
Now you can drag colors from the Swatch Drawer to the scroll list to add them to your custom palette or press [+] to add the color in the Swatch Drawer’s color well to the list.
To name the colors in your custom palette, click them to enter edit mode just as you would with files in the macOS Finder.
Once you have populated your custom palette click the Action Menu button and select Rename… to name your custom palette.
Click the Rename button to complete the process.
Your custom color palette will be stored in ~/Library/Colors. Now you can clear your Swatch Drawer and recreate the Pencil tab so that it is readily available until you upgrade to Mojave.
Select the Crayons palette in the Color Palettes tab.
Drag the first color, Licorice, to the first color cell in the Swatch Drawer.
Repeat Step 2 working left-to-right in the Swatch Drawer, until you have added the 13th color, Cayenne.
Resize the Colors panel so that you have 12 colors across in the Swatch Drawer; Cayenne should be the first color cell of the second row.
Continue adding the remaining colors from the Crayons palette to the swatch drawer.
Once you have completed this process, you should have a 4 × 12 matrix (4 rows of 12 colors) in the Swatch Drawer that are arranged just as they are in the Pencils tab.
The crayons are now available in the normal location for me.
