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 :)
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)
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?
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.
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?
6. Can objects be rotated? I'd like to be able to turn objects by 90-degree
increments at least.
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.
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?
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 :)
cheerio
Michael Ashton
