On Tue, 26 Oct 1999, Data wrote:
>
> Dear Dia-folk,
>
> I LOVE this program. Hence I have a few suggestions.
>
> I'm willing to help out developing it to a limited extent; if anyone's
> willing to give me a few pointers as to where to start on any of these
> items, I'll look into it. (Of course, you may not even _want_ these
> 'features' .. :) )
>
> It's possible that Dia can do what I want, but I just don't know how
> to make it do it. Sorry if any of these sound stupid.
>
> 1. I think it would be awfully cool if polygons had what I'll call 'sticky
> sides'. Right now, you can only attach connection points to other
> connection points; what if you could attach an arrow-head to the side
> of a rectangle, for example, and have that stick just as if it were
> attached to a connection point?
> Reason being is that I'm often finding myself doing drawings where
> I want two (or more) line-ends stuck to the side of a box; but a box
> only has one connection point on its side, and that's in the middle.
> Another possibility would be movable or even addable connection points.
> Pick up a connection point from the toolbox and drag it onto the side of
> a rectangle, for example. Maybe not so easy to code though :)
This is unforunately very hard. Both in the current Dia design and in
general. What you really would need is some kind of generic constraint
system. These are a fair bit more heavy-weight than Dia's current design
though. The problem is that all objects doesn't scale lineary (or affine),
they can have arbitrary complex behaviour, so how to move the
connectionpoints when the object changes is not at all simple.
Maybe one could add some kind of connection-lines. I dunno.
> 2. On most Mac drawing programs, you can hold down the shift key to
> constrain object movement to 90 or sometimes 45 degrees. I don't think
> Dia does this, but it would be nice. A 'Manhattan' mode like on Xfig
> (bless its heart) would also be quite nice ..
> Actually, I only want this because I often find that the 90-degree
> line can't do two-segment right-angle lines very well, especially if
> I'm using arrowheads. I really am glad that you brought back the
> old-style 90-degree line though (i.e. movable middle segment) - it
> was one of my favourite things about the original Dia (i.e. <=0.3)
As Lars said, this exists. Uses control instread of shift though.
What does Manhattan mode do?
One other thing in this line that could be added is holding down shift to
scale objects (if possible) homogenous in x/y.
> 3. This is not so much Dia's fault, but I'll mention it anyway: font support.
> I've had trouble with this for some time. Really it's an X issue, and
> I know how long-standing it is, and that it's a universal problem, and
> that you guys are probably hard at work fixing the font menu so that it
> has the fonts in your system on it instead of only the PS 35. I've heard
> that Gnome-Print is supposed to solve this, but I've found documentation
> on it to be rather scarce. Anybody have any tips?
No. This is a really hard problem. It might be worth checking out libart,
but i have a real problem depending on to many external libraries.
> 4. This may be contrary to the Dia/Visio UI design, but I'm a Mac veteran,
> and I do wish you could select ranges of text and so forth on text
> objects.
This could probably be done. Might be some work though.
> 5. Currently the properties dialog seems to be associated with one object
> only - to get the properties for a different object you have to double
> click it, getting another properties dialog. Could this dialog be made
> persistent, so that clicking on a different object caused that object's
> properties to appear in the properties dialog?
Ehh? Double-clicking on another object makes that objects properties
appear in the old properties dialog? (In fact, there is only one
properties-dialog).
> 6. Can objects be rotated? I'd like to be able to turn objects by 90-degree
> increments at least.
No. This is currently a limitation in Dias renderer interface. Text can't
be rendered rotated, nor can ellipses. This is really a problem
originating from X too. It is possible to fix this, but just like the font
issue it's a lot of work.
> 7. Right now there are no defaults for the Text tool. I'd like to see it
> have some defaults - these would be the same as the object properties.
> There are perhaps other objects where this would be useful as well.
Oops. Fixed in CVS (by lars).
> 8. The line thickness and arrow selectors on the toolbox are quite nice.
> Could they be made to affect existing objects, instead of just newly
> created ones?
Yes, this should be possible. Would need some kind of callback to the
selected objects. Anyone wanna do this?
> Incidentally, I'm pleased to report that Dia 0.80 has performed beautifully
> on my RH6 / October Gnome setup. The instability problems that
> 0.41 suffered from seem to be completely gone. Thanks for doing such a
> great job. I'd report some bugs, but I haven't run across any yet :)
Ohh? You had stability problems with 0.41? I hadn't heard about that.
There is still two unaccounted crashing bug reports from Elliot... But we
should really make a new release since some small bugs have been fixed.
/ Alex
