I am writing this in the hopes of helping someone else use the program.:working: We recognize that there is a difference in the ways things are accomplished in Dia from normal page layout programs, such as word processors and desktop publishing. So one needs a good start.:-)
Please remember that these specific steps help the new user practice a mental method of doing things that may well help them translate from WYSIWYG environments. I have also found that the following works for those of us who use Imperial measurements. I suggest that one begin by setting the program preferences. The first area is User Interface. Make sure you have plenty of undos; something like 15. Change the units of length and font size to something like inches and points, respectively. Under View Defaults I played around with new window width and height by selecting 800 and 950 respectively. This will give you a space on the right for the tools window. Under Grid Lines, I selected to uncheck Dynamic Grid Resizing. I usually usually like to make everything snap to gridlines, so I can automatically keep things aligned. At this point a new window could be opened, showing the top left corner at 0,0, with the size specs you set. Now you have something that works fairly well for portrait. Next I go to Page Setup and select landscape, change the margins to something you like to see printed such as 1/2 inch all around, and Fit to 1 by 1. Then I manually resize my window to show the whole page. This exercise shows how to get the clear limits displayed by the blue lines without wasted space. If necessary, now I use the zoom shortcut keys, Ctrl - and Ctrl +, to zoom until I see my page as close to 0,0 in the top left corner. (Don't forget to move the darn scrollbars to top and left to see the focus remain at 0,0.) Now I should see the workable area, minus the margins, defined by the default blue lines. At 1024 x 768, you will see all of your page with extra space at left, right and bottom. The top will be at 0. I'm sure this should work at other resolutions as well, although I have not tried it. All you have to do is keep your diagram within that space. Once you understand this easy-to-see setup display, you may then switch to another format, and other different settings to note the changes, one by one. (Each different page format will require dragging the window corner to resize it and then move the scrollbars to zero them out again.) Remember to zoom in to do more detailed work. Use the scrollbars to keep yourself in a mental relationship to the whole as you go along. This is the one great way to become familiar with what you need to learn to expect on the canvas, or window space, especially if you come from a WYSIWYG environment. Good Luck! =) -- View this message in context: http://old.nabble.com/Page-Layout-How-To-For-WYSIWYG-People-tp32075994p32075994.html Sent from the Gnome - Dia mailing list archive at Nabble.com. _______________________________________________ dia-list mailing list [email protected] http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/dia-list FAQ at http://live.gnome.org/Dia/Faq Main page at http://live.gnome.org/Dia
