OmniGraffle

My new book will be published Open Access, and I also aim only to use open-source tools as part of the writing process. The most challenging has been to figure out how to make nice-looking illustrations. Parts of the book are based on the Ph.D. dissertation that I wrote a long time ago. I wrote that on a MacBook and made all the illustrations in OmniGraffle. While it was quite easy to make the switch to Ubuntu in general, OmniGraffle has been one of the few programs I have really missed in the Linux world. True, many graphics tools are available, but none with the same type of finesse as OmniGraffle. ...

When creating figures for papers written in LaTeX, I have found it aesthetically unpleasing to have different fonts in the figures than in the text. Most figures I create in either OmniGraffle or Matlab, and here I have relied on regular OS X fonts. Fortunately, I have discovered that it is possible to use LaTeX fonts in OS X. Apparently, this is now included as a feature in the latest version(s) of the MacTeX distribution (?), but I also discovered that it is possible to just download the fonts (as OTF files) and install them directly: ...

OmniGraffle is one of my favourite programs, mainly because it can generate professional looking graphics very easily. However, one thing has been annyoing me for quite some time: pressing the tab button when you are in a text box moves the cursor to another object rather than indenting the text inside of the object. After searching around a little, I found a blog post explaining that you need to use cmd-tab to get the expected tabulator functionality. Not the most logical thing, but at least I am happy to be able to indent text also in OmniGraffle.

I have been trying to create a booklet out of a standing A4 paper (the booklet size should be 105 x 297 mm), but this has proven to be much more difficult than I would have originally thought. It is a while since I have been doing things like this, and I still remember how easy it was to do such things back in the days when I used to use MS Publisher 1.0 for everything (that must have been the best MS program ever!). I also recall that creating brochures with PageMaker was a simple thing. ...

Time has come for preparing my dissertation for official printing. Luckily, I had done most of the formatting when creating the manuscript for the committee, so I expected an easy process. It hasn’t been too bad, but some challenges have appeared: CMYK: There are several years since I last had to deal with professional printing, so I had totally forgotten about the need for preparing all colour images in CMYK. Similarly, the people at the printing office asked me to convert all images that are supposed to appear in b/w to grayscale. Having something like 200 images in by dissertation, it has taken some time to batch-process, re-batch-process, and manually sort out all of this. I only have the non-UB version of Photoshop which took far too long, so I decided to try the batch processing capabilities in GraphicConverter. After some tweaking of parameters it seems to work quite well, although it refuses to convert from RGB to CMYK. It says that it does it, but the files remain in RGB. So the solution was to convert everything to grayscale (which worked!), and then to manually convert the pictures on the 11 pages I will print in colour to CMYK. Ah, when are they going to invent RGB printers… Vector graphics and transparency: I love the crisp printing produced by the vector graphics coming out of OmniGraffle Pro. Unfortunately, the people at the printing company told me that they have problems with the transparency in these images. After trying a bunch of different combinations, I finally had to give up my nice-looking vectors and save them all as.jpgs. They don’t look that bad, but vector graphics certainly look better. Cropping: One of the best features of Preview in OS X is its ability to crop images easily by just selecting an area of the image and hitting apple-k. Preview warns that cropping PDFs is non-destructive, but I turned off that error message a long time ago, and haven’t thought about it much ever since. This is also because PDFTex reads the cropped PDF files correctly, and maintains the cropping when I output my PDF from the TeX code. However, while doing my batch processing I realised that GraphicConverter does not care about the cropping set by Preview and opens the original version of the PDF. So I had to recrop everything in GraphicConverter and run another batch process. I learned the lesson: never do things the easy way, do it right from the beginning! Now things seem to be sorted out, and I hope they accept my document this time around. The only challenge is to create a web-savvy version of the document, with RGB colours…

After reading Ola’s blog entry about content management, I decided to give MindManager a try. Except for the price tag (luckily they have educational discounts), I like it a lot. It is the first mindmapping software I find useful, and I particularly like the possibility to make notes on any entry. This makes it possible to really use it for mind mapping, and not only as a visualisation tool. Previously, I have tested NovaMind, which creates some fancy-looking mindmaps, but the GUI is much too clumsy for me, and it seems focused on creating printable mindmaps. Freemind is another (free) alternative, but it is not in UB-version, and I am not sure if it is still in development. ...

I had a discussion about which software tools I use for my research, so here is a list of the most important (in no particular order): Firefox: with adblock and mouse gestures. NetNewsWire: for handling all the blogs I am reading. MarsEdit: to write blog entries. Publishes directly to my WordPress driven blog. OmniGraffle: for making diagrams. I even made my last conference poster with this program, works great also with photos. OmniPutliner: for making nested lists of everything BibDesk: for handling all my references + linking all the relevant PDF-files. DevonThink Pro: for storing texts and PDFs of information. I also use the built-in AI-improved search tool for finding relevant stuff in my BibDesk library. TeXshop: for writing my dissertation. Greatly simplifies writing a LaTeX document. TextWrangler: for batch processing of text files. Max/MSP/Jitter: for all my programming needs. And some web services that I couldn’t live without either: ...

I have been thinking about what I wrote about improvisation a couple of weeks ago. While preparing for a presentation last week, I was thinking about how linear my presentation software (Apple’s Keynote) is. It is as bad as PowerPoint when it comes to locking you into a linear presentation style. This is fine if you have a clear idea of what you would like to say and which order you want to say things in, but I often find that I have several sections that could be organized differently dependent on the audience, the time constraints etc. I wish some of these presentation programs could allow for this. Yes, I could be creating a web page, and use Opera’s presentation mode, but I really like the simplicity of creating multimedia-savvy presentations in Keynote. ...

InDesign used to be my program of choice for design issues, but since it is super-slow on my MacIntel I have been looking for another solution. OmniGraffle Pro has been my main tool for creating small vector graphics for a while, and I gave it a chance to make a full poster. I am very happy with the work flow and the end result looks great. It handles pictures effortlessly (although I miss some simple photo tweaking utilities and cropping) and the graphics look very crisp even in a large format. Not really sure why I didn’t try this a long time ago.

Edward Tufte has an interesting Wired article entitled PowerPoint Is Evil. The main point is that PowerPoint forces people to create presentations in a certain way, and he especially comments on the problems of bullet points. I have made quite a lot of PowerPoint presentations over the years, and I clearly see his point. It is, indeed, easy to fall into the habit of creating lots of bullet points covering everything you want to say. In my own experience, this has been because I didn’t want to create a manuscript, and then the slides with bullet points served as notes to myself. Starting some months back, I have tried to use the notes field more, so that I can have the points available for myself, but display less on the screen that is visible to the audience. I have also started experimenting with using OmniGraffle Pro for presentations, since it now allows for making links between various diagrams. This is, at least for me, a much more intuitive and nonlinear approach to create presentations, although it does not support video and audio playback. That said, true media support seems to be poor in all the current presentation tools. ...