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My OmniGraffle Wish: Converted Scale Values

Lately, I've had the need to lay out a lot of stuff in OmniGraffle lately. You know what would be nice? A "Conversion Scale." In other words, I'd draw a block and say "for the purpose of this document, this rectangle is 10 feet wide. Then I could enter sizes for things (chairs, tables, etc.) in feet and inches and OmniGraffle could scale them to the appropriate pixel size.

If I had to specify a manual ratio (1 square = ½ foot), that too could work, but the prior seems a bit more intuitive.

The only way to do this in OmniGraffle currently is to determine your own scale and keep it as simple as possible, like "1 pixel = 1 inch." This leaves a lot to be desired if the ideal scale can't be accommodated due to the size of your project area.

4 Responses to "My OmniGraffle Wish: Converted Scale Values"

  1. OmniGraffle 4.1 supports this; you have to show the rulers in a document and from there it should be reasonably obvious...

    I think this feature was new in 4.

  2. No, it doesn't support conversions. What I'd like to do is to enter in 18 inches and have that converted to whatever scale I have chosen for that document (perhaps 18 pixels, perhaps 10 pixels, perhaps 0.2321 inches).

    Yes, OmniGraffle allows you to change the measurement, but it does no conversion (beyond the 1:1 ratio).

  3. Are you sure you've found OmniGraffle 4's new ruler scale feature? If you set the scale to "1 in = 8 ft" (for example), you can enter the width of a shape as "12 ft" and it will create a shape which only uses 1.5 inches of canvas.

  4. I likely haven't found that, then, as that's what I'm after. I'll have a look.