Hi! I just today discovered Dia and said 'Yumyum'[1]. I've been looking for a tool like this for quite a while now, not being very happy with Xfig. I realise this is a very unfinished program, so I'd like to do some work on it. I was looking into improving Xfig, but it's not very feasible. Let me first mention what I want to use Dia for. I'm a Ph.D. student in computer science, so I'll be writing ariticles and tech reports now and then. For those, I need a tool to make diagrams, mostly consisting of boxes with text and connections between them. Xfig does this ok to a certain extent: The interface is impractical, there are no multi-line texts, there is no connection between lines and boxes etc. And it's ugly to boot:) This is where Dia shows a lot of promise. And it's so beautiful with GTK:) So it didn't take me long to come up with a wishlist:) Of course, I'd like to help doing these things I suggest, as far as my abilities and time go. The most important feature I'd like to see is to be able to 'bind' any line to any object, like some of the UML lines do. After that, in approximate order of importance: Arrow heads on ordinary lines. Shift-drag to restrict movement (horizontal/vertical lines, square boxes, circles etc). Options for the various tools should be settable like in Gimp, by double-clicking the tool box widget. Put toggleable options on a menu on middle mouse button on objects. Splines. A limit on the width of a text 'box', with word wrap. E.g. if you drag the text 'cursor' at the start, you indicate a width. When having created an object, it shouldn't switch back to the pointer tool. Transparent boxes. More formats to export to. A sticky point: Should the keybindings be different when editing text? I for instance (being an Emacs user) like to use Ctrl-D to delete to the right, but that has rather severe consequences. But on the other hand, having different keybindings is a bit messy. So, where do we go from here? I checked out the source, got it to compile and run (though I have to give it an option, such as --help, or it pours out warning boxes by the hundred). What is being worked on presently and what not? -Lars [1] Did you get those commercials for Maxibon in Sweden, too? -- Lars R. Clausen ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) A *real* smart bomb would call in sick, perhaps move to another country, changing its name in the process, open a beach bar maybe and live out its days in safe anonymity. -- Barry O'Neill in rhod
