Hello, This is my first post to this list. I have been working on dia for the past week, and thought I would summarise some of the changes I have made. The biggest change I have made is the addition of the custom shape library. When it is complete, it will allow non coders to add shapes to dia by writing some simple XML files. For an example of of the XML files, see the following: http://cvs.gnome.org/lxr/source/dia/objects/custom/Circuit/npn.shape Currently loading, saving, moving, resizing and drawing is working. The shape description is a subset of the SVG format. Currently the line, polyline, polygon, rect, circle and ellipse elements are supported. The style attributes of these elements are currently ignored, but I plan to allow you to set line width (relative to the user specified value) and maybe allow swaping foreground/background for a particular element. I also plan to add support for fixing the aspect ratio on a shape, and maybe flipping (or even rotating?) a custom shape. Support for setting the sheet icon for custom shapes also needs to be done. Another thing is to allow internationalisation of the descriptions. It looks like the best way to do this is with the use of the xml:lang attribute on the description element. I have also added a line style and arrow style selector to the main toolbox. There is an screenshot of it available here: http://www.daa.com.au/~james/dia-tbox.png This allows you to change the line style before placing an element in a way that is consistent between tools. So if you want to draw a dotted line and then a dotted arc, you only need to set tat property once, rather than setting the default for each tool. It is also a bit quicker to access. I have modified the standard line types to use these settings, but I still need to get the standard shapes to use the line style. You can test this out in the latest CVS version of dia. If you want to test the custom shape code a bit, that would be great. Do not expect the file format to stay absolutely compatible as I develop it though. Any comments are welcome. James. -- Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] WWW: http://www.daa.com.au/~james/
