On Thu, 4 Nov 1999, Uwe Assmann wrote:
> Thanks for your information. I discovered that I had to switch off option
> 'compressed saving'; then XML appears in a dia DTD. Wonderful!
Using gziped XML gives the best of both worlds -- small file size and
human readable/editable format.
>
> Now I need just two other things:
>
> - how to shadow a diagram (a rectangle)? StarOffice has a 'shadow button'
> which does this nicely. And this looks immediately as if it was 3-d.
Currently this is not implemented in dia. I have an idea of how to do
this though. It would require writing a new filtering renderer. It would
basically set the colour to black (or grey) for all drawing operations,
and offset coordinates by some value. This way we could use each object's
current drawing routine to draw the shadow by using the shadow renderer.
This is not implemented at the moment.
>
> - how to define own libraries? I'm developing a new box model, so I need
> boxes and special lines.
>
For shapes, you can choose either to use the custom shape XML format
(which uses SVG internally) to draw the shapes, provided that they only
need to be stretched affinely when scaling them and don't have any weird
properties like the Networks sheet's ethernet bus or UML sheet's class
objects. The docs for the custom shape XML format is in
objects/custom/README. If you need any special behaviour, you will need
to code the new shapes in C. Lines also have to be done in C at present.
There is no documentation on the C interface at the moment, so you would
need to look at some of the other object libraries for ideas. Your best
bet is to copy the C code of an object that is similar to what you need
and modify it to do what you want.
>
> /Uwe
>
James.
--
Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
WWW: http://www.daa.com.au/~james/