Shapes and connectors

Shapes are the nouns of a diagram and connectors are the verbs. This page covers creating both, labelling them, and reusing shapes from stencil libraries.

Drawing shapes

1. Choose the shape you want from the ribbon’s Shapes gallery: rectangle, rounded rectangle, ellipse, diamond, cylinder and the rest.
2. Press S or click Shape in the Tools group.
3. Drag on the canvas. Hold while dragging to size it; release to place it.

The ribbon’s Node button drops a default-sized node in the centre of the visible canvas without dragging, clear of anything already there: useful when you are building a diagram quickly and intend to auto-layout it afterwards.

Labels

Select a shape and start typing, or double-click it, to edit its label in place. Press ⎋ or click elsewhere to finish. While the label editor is open the normal editing shortcuts (⌘C, ⌘V, ⌘Z and the single-letter tool keys) all belong to the text field, so you can edit text normally.

Resizing and moving

• Drag a selection handle to resize; drag the body to move.
• Objects snap to the grid and to alignment guides as you drag.
• The Inspector’s geometry fields set exact position and size in the document’s unit.
• Arrow keys nudge the selection.

Connectors

Press C and drag from one shape to another. Connection points light up as the pointer nears a shape; drop on the shape body to let the connector pick the best point automatically, or on a specific point to pin it there.

With a connector selected, the Inspector controls:

• Routing: straight, orthogonal or curved.
• Arrowheads at each end.
• Line colour, width and dash pattern.
• Label: text carried along the connector, with its own placement.

Arrange ▸ Smart Route Connectors re-routes every connector in the diagram orthogonally, steering around shapes. The status bar reports how many edges were re-routed.

Free-form paths

The Pen tool (P) places points to build an arbitrary path: useful for annotations and shapes the gallery does not cover.

Stencils

Open View ▸ Show Stencils for the stencil panel: libraries of ready-made shapes grouped by domain. Drag any stencil onto the canvas to stamp a copy, styled and sized to match the library. Stencils are ordinary shapes once placed, so you can restyle, resize and connect them freely.

Custom SVG shapes

To bring in artwork of your own, choose Insert ▸ Custom SVG Shape… (also at File ▸ Import ▸ SVG as Shape…) and pick an SVG file. The artwork becomes a single shape you can place, size and connect like any other: its geometry is preserved, so it stays crisp at any zoom and in PDF and SVG exports.

Object actions and hyperlinks

A shape can carry an action: opening a URL, jumping to another canvas, or revealing a file. Set it in the Inspector’s action section. On the canvas, ⌘-double-click the object to run its action; the Inspector’s action section can also run it directly. Plain double-click is reserved for label editing, so actions never fire by accident while you are writing.