On Tue, 26 Oct 1999, [EMAIL PROTECTED] 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 :)
It's one of my top things-to-code-when-I-ever-get-some-spare-time.
Unfortunately, it doesn't seem to be that easy to implement.
> 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)
The control key does that. Though not in an optimal way (try using it for
dragging the size of a box).
> 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.
Would be nice indeed. So should movement be restricted to just grabbing
the handles? That I think doesn't sit well with the way moving objects
works...
> 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?
That shouldn't be difficult.
> 6. Can objects be rotated? I'd like to be able to turn objects by
> 90-degree increments at least.
Not yet, though I don't see anything in the way of doing this.
> 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.
Very easy to do, I believe. In fact, let me... there, diff sent.
> 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?
Some way of setting attributes for a bunch of objects is sorely needed. I
was working on a standardization of properties that would allow this when
the undo code cut across it.
-Lars
--
Lars R. Clausen (http://shasta.cs.uiuc.edu/~lrclause) H�rdgrim of Westfield
"I do not agree with a word that you say, but I will defend to the death your
right to say it." -- Voltaire (?)
