Lots of problems! Hangs, crashes, hair loss

[overbored <overbored overbored net>]

AAAAAAAAUUUUUUGGGGGGHHHHHHHH!!!

Now that that's out of the way...

Hi, I'm completely new to Dia, but I'm already seeing a multitude of
nasty problems that are making the program unusable and the experience
an exercise in frustration.



1. I just installed the Windows version (0.94) from dia-installer.sf.net
onto my XP box, and I see a console window with 'I/O warning : failed to
load external entity "NULL"'. Is there a way to get rid of the console,
or did it just appear because of the warning? What's up with the warning?

Later it prints:

"Destroyed dialog
Destroyed dialog
Destroyed dialog

(dia.exe:512): GLib-GObject-CRITICAL **: file gobject.c: line 1579
(g_object_unr
ef): assertion `G_IS_OBJECT (object)' failed
Destroyed dialog"

Assertions? Am I working with some debug build here?



2. The following more serious problem only happened once and caused me
to lose my first drawing, and despite trying a whole bunch of things to
reproduce it, I can't. Since it was running during my first session, it
might be related to the above messages. I don't know.

Anyway, after I clicked on the little Pan icon on the bottom right of
the diagram window, dragging, and releasing, the program suddenly
started behaving strangely. I couldn't click on anything, or scroll, or
pan (middle-click), so I thought I had to click on the Pan icon again. I
did, and then the tiny Pan window showed up, but nothing was displayed
in it. Furthermore, my cursor was stuck in the Pan window! I had to hit
ctrl-alt-del and bring up taskmgr to kill the process, which also ate up
100% CPU (I did wait a good minute first).



3. When I drag an arced arrow around, it sometimes leaves some sort of
artifact where the arrow head was originally positioned. The only way I
know of to get rid of it is by dragging some other object over the
artifact.



4. After grouping a single group and trying to ungroup twice, I get
"Trying to ungroup with no selected objects." And then, after
de-selecting and re-selecting, the program either seems to resume normal
operation, or crash (as in, I see the error reporting window). Again, I
haven't been able to reproduce this. However I did not see any unusual
console output aside from the initial IO warning.



5. (Just trying to illustrate one session of this newbie's experience
for anybody who cares.)

I am trying to insert some simple symbols like sigma, but when I paste
them from charmap, it doesn't paste the font info so I just get an 'S'.
I try to change the font manually to Symbol (which seems to imply I
can't mix different fonts together - IMO, this is a huge shortcoming).
But since bug 150653 is around, I can't change the font; rather, I lose
about 2 minutes of work (thank goodness for AutoSave). So I do a bit of
searching on embedding LaTeX, and I try writing $\Sigma$ in the text box
as specified in the FAQ, but I don't see a sigma. No problem, I thought,
it'll show up once I render it into a .eps or any other format. Try #1:
whoops, clicked on the Pango .eps option, crashed, lost work again.
Trial #2: got it into a .eps, but when I take a look, no sigma, only
$\Sigma$. Also, I only saw part of my apparently gargantuan drawing (the
first page), but I thought this might be because I can't see an entire
.eps in GSview or something.

The only conclusion I could come up with is that the FAQ was misleading
and dia actually can't do anything related to TeX aside from the export.
(I think the FAQ should at least say to use the PSTricks export.) Fine,
I thought; it was silly to assume that Dia includes all the necessary
TeX packages anyway. So I look at the export options again, do some
research, learn about PSTricks, and decide that's what I need. I export
to that and I have my output in .dvi/.ps formats. Except the behemoth
drawing is cut off (different than the .eps from before), and I could
only see two pages of eight (it's only so big because I didn't realize
the blue lines meant page boundaries). And the sigma itself was cut off,
so I had no idea if it worked.

I go back and try resizing everything. No luck. I search the mailing
list, and I see that it's simply not possible to resize groups. Yes,
there was an explanation about some objects not being resizable, but...
_WTF_???

I manually resized every single object and re-align them all. BTW, after
I understood the scale, I thought the default line thickness is way too
big. Plus the dynamic scale didn't quite seem to work; the
snapping-to-grid caused jumps across half my screen. And the font in the
text objects are not enlarged (but the cursor is, and its position is
completely off). After I finish everything, I re-export.

I see my sigma.

I break down in tears.

Elapsed time: way too frickin' long.



6. My actual question related to #7: how do I get all my pages to show
up in LaTeX? Is this at all possible? And is this the only method of
integrating math formulas into my diagrams (to go through LaTeX)?



7. The grid is not consistent. I know that dragging an object in
different locations aligns that location to the grid, but when I have
two concentric circles grouped and I try dragging their center, why is
the grid misaligned?? Same goes for anything grouped, I believe.



8. Is Dia beta software? I couldn't find any mention of this fact on
the main site, but I truly think it should be labeled as such (at least
the Windows version). Unless the version number 0.94 being less than one
somehow implicitly conveys this.



9. Can anybody recommend any alternatives in the OSS world? The only
programs I've heard of are various ones I've found via Google and the
ones listed on Dia's links:

- XFig: used this before, isn't in the same league
- Kivio: doesn't run in Windows (Kivio mp looks crippled). I'm still
curious to know how this compares with Dia.
- JGraphPad: I just tried this, and it seemed OK (not as buggy), but
couldn't do any LaTeX or formulas. To write sigma - b I have to create 2
separate textboxes and align them.



Well, that's it (for now). I know that's a lot, but hey - I did take the
time to write this, and I'm a big fan of (using) OSS in general, so I'd
love to see this product become better. I'd very much appreciate answers
to any of these questions, and I also hope my feedback aids Dia's
development. Thanks in advance.