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although omnigraffle doesn’t have any built-in tools to make circular or curved lines, constructing such objects is easy to do.

simply make orthogonal lines in roughly the shape you’d like your curved lines to be in.  then, in the styles formatting pane go to the lines and shapes tab.  set the corner radius to 10000 pt and presto: nicely curved lines!


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if that was helpful ...

check out the other tips and tricks i've compiled on these pages. you might learn something else interesting!

5 Responses to “make curved lines or arrows in omnigraffle”

  1. on 09 May 2008 at 1:40 pm 44f20b7a0028

    44f20b7a0028…

    44f20b7a00288aad4fb5…

  2. on 06 May 2010 at 1:00 am graffle

    Thank you. This was very helpful. I tried to find good curved or round arrows for OmniGraffle, but to no avail. There are couple curved arrows in Graffletopia but not what I need. With you trick, I can create any round arrows I want.

  3. on 20 Jul 2011 at 8:16 am Boris

    Hi Lawrence,

    google got me here and you saved my day with this “Trick”.

    Thank you so much!

    Cheers
    Boris

  4. on 16 Aug 2011 at 7:35 pm Tom

    Hi Lawrence,

    I found you by google, and was really glad to have found this tip.

    But dismay! When I tried it out, it didn’t quite do what I thought it did.

    I wanted to add arrows to an arc of a circle to indicate an angle; using your method, the arrows didn’t quite point along the tangent of the circle :(

    My workaround which I wanted to share here was to draw three identical straight lines, and rotate them. I left the first horizontal, the second at half the angle I wanted, and the third at the full angle.

    I then aligned the points at one end of all three lines at the same point: \|/. Because they are the same length this is like three spokes of a bicycle. I drew a fourth line between the first and third lines, making a triangle with the second line bisecting it.

    I set the fourth line to be a straight line, but added a bezier point halfway along and pulled it out to make more of a kite shape.

    Then I used your trick of setting the curve to be a very high value, and dragged the bezier point until the centre of the fourth line coincided with the end of the second.

    Now I have a lovely arc in a pretty accurate curve, and my arrow points are nice and perpendicular to the line from the origin.

    Sorry that’s been so verbose: it’s really easy to see in a picture, but takes about 1000 words to describe… Hope it helps someone.

    T

  5. on 12 Oct 2012 at 6:37 pm Arun

    Thank you for the neat tip! It was very helpful!

Did I get this wrong? Let me know!

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