On Sat, 30 Oct 1999, James Henstridge wrote:
> I was more talking of wavy lines as a graphics primitive and wondering
> which objects you needed the primitive for.
Hmmm, okay, I mis-interpreted your post, sorry.
OTOH, Dia has already dozens of types of "boxes with some text inside
it". Now, dozens of "special kind of lines", each forking from the
archetype. Indeed, there's already a big amount of code duplication in
the project. The rationale behind adding a "line geometry" property to
every basic object which draws line is to limit a bit that forking.
> There are already a number of different line objects -- take a look at the
> UML sheet for examples. If you need a wavy connecting line for a
> particular type of diagram, it probably makes sense to create a new line
> object.
well, since that type of diagram I want to draw makes uses of only text
and arrows (solid, dotted and wavy ones), I'll end up with a really useful
and senseful one-object (wavy arrow) sheet (I can see the logic, such as
in the Flowchart sheet ; and then, when the original line gets upgraded
(or fixed, or tweaked), there's going to be a quite heavy work of
retrofitting the changes into the forked objects. Ugh.). Besides, that
sheet, while probably named "SFM", will contain, to an user who doesn't
know anything about TRIZ just a simple wavy line, which might be useful on
another page as well, and then here we fork again.
There must be a better way.
An idea :
We let dia drop the direct loading of binary libraries' objects
into sheets. Instead, we handle the loading of a binary object into
a sheet through the index.sheet mechanism (of course, this
requires tweaking the DTD, but well). This would allow any new sheet to
"re-brand" an already existing object type for a different use (if done
properly, even the icon xpm should be overrideable).
And with ~/.dia/shapes, we let the user re-organise her/his sheets the
way s/he wants.
Unfortunately, that might mean a pretty big change in dia. Perhaps a
worthy one.
[rotating X fonts]
> Well if you can convince Alex of this, I guess it will go in. But it is
> still very difficult to get arbitrarily rotated text with the current X
> api's (the work around code would be very ugly), so I don't know how
> likely it is that it will go in.
Mmmmh, I'm afraid I don't have the time (and GDK wizardry knoweldge) to
code this for the moment. I'll come back on this when I have something
worth looking at (such as benchmarks).
--Cyrille
PS: where's now the stuff which used to be at
http://www.daa.com.au/~james/dia-sheet-ns ?
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Oh, my god ! I'm trapped into a V90 modem ! PGP ID: A879BEF8
