Answer to /Manual?, Claus Ritter/ Re: Manual?, Steffen Macke

["Claus Ritter" <Ritter fzi de>]

Answer to /Manual?, Claus Ritter/ Re: Manual?, Steffen Macke 
I don't know how to answer a specific mail? Maybe somebody can help
me...

Hello,

I want to use dia as a graphical frontend for a hardware simulator of a
dataflow processor. I want to use it for drawing and visually layouting
(for a better overview) the design to implement. The different devices
in the circuit should be used in a drag&drop manner (available in DIA).
After that I want to extract the netlist from dia to pass it to the raw
hardware simulator which uses netlists.

Open questions for me are:
- is there the possibilty to hierarchically organize a design? E.g. a
block represents a part of the circuit specified in another dia diagram.
Is this possible at all?
- is it possible to define my own menus with the right mouse button on
objects(groups), like VISIO?

In a longterm I plan also to visualize the state of the hardware for
every clock cycle. Therefore it's interesting how flexible(fast) the
interface of dia is when the program gets data delivered from an
external source? 
        
This work now is purely academic (I'm in a scientific institution), but
in the future it can become commercial. Right now I'm in the search for
a program fullfilling the above requests for the commercial hardware
simulator I want to use. I started with VISIO which is able to do the
above things, but the hardware simulator is written in LINUX and we
don't want to have different OS.
If anybody can help me with my questions I would be very thankful. 
Dia is a powerful tool and I really want to use it in my tool chain. But
I need descriptions of the interfaces.

Thanx,
Claus