Re: Structuring DIA sheets

[Alan Horkan <horkana maths tcd ie>]

This has been discussed before
http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=100169

i have a habit of mentioning it every few weeks.
Firstly sensible organisation of the files on disk would be a good idea,
and the catagories suggested in the first post of this thread seemed
senisble enough.
The way i see it the user interface should allow you to create many
and varied sheets for their own personal use that it would not
necessarily make sense even to inlcude in Dia.
i was pondering how you would show all the elispe/round shapes, you could
get into all sorts of advanaced ways to handle,search,organise, the
objects, but i am going a bit offtopic.

I did not like how Visio used menus, it makes it very difficult to select
shapes from multiple sheets easily or get a quick view of all of the
sheets and shapes available.  Treeview has some drawbacks too but i think
it is much better.

You want multiple sheets at the same time?
Well ages and ages and ages ago i asked if the sheets menu could have a
GTK tearaway widget added and i think it was Lars Clausen generously added
it very quickly.  Only there has not been a realase in ages.
In the CVS version you can tear off the sheet and have multiple sheets
shown at once (AFAIK, insert disclaimer here in case i have misunderstood
exactly how and what can be torn away).

> 1.  diagrams could be nested, and
> 2.  sheets were diagrams.

interesting.
having looked at Visio 2000 the widget where the sheets are displayed is a
fairly standard file manager widget (probably got the name totally wrong
but anyway) you can show them as icons, as icons withouth text, as small
icons.
I was thinking it would be really nice if Dia could grab and reuse some
sort of standard widget (reusable => more easily maintained).  To keep Dia
like it is the widget would need to support or have added a "Buttonised
list" which will be familiar to some of you especially those who have used
Mac OS 9.  I dont recally if i filed a bug report suggesting this, i doubt
i have because it was a rather vague notion, and i was worried that some
one might overzealously throw something non-portable together using Bonobo
and break/neglect the windows version.  I think i discussed it with Lars
offlist.

Sincerely

Alan Horkan
http://advogato.org/person/AlanHorkan/

PS other ideas not so random ideas soon!
i have been adding a few more essentials shapes (car, tree, took me hours
literally) to my Isometric 3-D Directional Map shapes so it is almost in a
state that i could release it, at least dump the files on a webserver so
you can see.  Still need to do nice icons for it, and add a few more
shapes (dont want anyone treading on my toes later, trying to add shapes
that are not as meticoulously produced as mine.  I spent hours, i think
i am probably being a bit too finickey).
Not sure about what to call the sheet 'Directonal Map' is kinda crap, and
I dont want to call it 3D as that would push my Assorted sheet from being
shown first ;)

PPS Release Date?  Is a pre christmas release still gonna happern (should
probably start a whole new thread to ask this).  How about a pre-release
for 0.91, need to motivate myself to finish off or at least tidy up lots
of bits and pieces and get them in soon.

Later
Alan

:)

> > > structuring/display mechanism to manage them such as:
> > > - grouping sheets by category (and maybe subcategory)
> > > eg. network, electrical engineering, software engineering,...
> > > - associating a subset of working sheet to each open diagram.

> If that's too ambitious, surely it's possible to put shapes in arbitrary
> directories and adapt someone's File manager tree view to the purpose?

keep it portable!

> It would be good if users could organize their own sheets, and it would be
> especially good if they didn't have to use Dia or configure Dia to do so.

patches that make the Dia XML importer more forgiving of mistakes in your
markup are welcome.

> The problem is not very different from managing a mail store in an MUA.
> In fact, if there were a standard XML folder DTD, I'd suggest that as a
> starting point.
>
> --jkl
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