How to insert 'dia'grams into Star Office 5.2 text document

[Jim Clayson <jimc netcomuk co uk>]

Hi,

I'm new to dia and this list so be gentle! :-)

Just to begin with, I think Dia is great - I only discovered it about 
two weeks ago and I was in need of a tool to use during the intial 
scoping of a new project.

I'm in the process of creating a text document in Star Office 5.2 and I 
have inserted a few 'dia'grams into a few of the documents pages. This 
is fine except I get the feeling my diagrams are too big - in terms of 
file size - for me to put the whole document onto floppy.

The soffice document is 60 pages long - just simple text formatting - 
but it is 4.5Mb in file size which I would say is way too big.

My 'dia'grams are simple UML use case analysis diagrams consistsing of 
use case diagrams and activity diagrams.

I'm able to save my diagrams before any exporting as 'dia' files and 
they are mostly all below 50k is file size.

The problem is this: when I export them to png format and insert them 
straight into star office, they lose too much detail. I'm talking so 
much that you can't even make out what the letters are and the lines are 
irregularily broken when they should be solid. This is not just a screen 
thing either as they print from soffice in exactly the same terrible 
quality.

My work around has been:

Enlarge my '.dia' diagrams to span many pages i.e. from scale 35 to 450 
and export them in that proportion as .png files (portable network 
graphic). When I then insert these .png files into my soffice page, 
they are a lot clearer and they automatically fit to the page. They 
also print out in a much better quality. The exporting of the dia to png 
results in a bloated png file, though. I'm ending up with 230k on 
average per diagram and this is what is resulting in a huge overall 
document size of 4.5Mb.

Any tips, hints or tricks much appreciated.

Jim