Re: Off List Posting

[Lars Clausen <lrclause cs uiuc edu>]

On 9 Sep 2003, Alexandre Prokoudine wrote:
> Lars Clausen wrote:
> > On 4 Sep 2003, David Richards wrote:
> >
> > > Gentlemen-
> > > We are rolling out OpenOffice for our whole City in about 7 weeks,
> > > and part of that will be that I will be installing Dia as well to offer
> > > additional functionality.
> > That's very exciting!  I hope you are aware of the upcoming 0.92
> > release, some features of which I'm sure your users would appreciate
> > (especially the autorouting).  There's still much that should be done,
> > but this is very encouraging.
>
> BTW, how does autorouting work?

It's fairly primitive right now, but open to improvements.  Its current aim
is to remove the problems with zig-zag lines pointing the wrong way.

Each connection point has a field telling which of the four cardinal
directions are 'open', i.e. it'd look ok to have an arrow come in there.
The autorouter then tries various combinations of directions in both ends
of a line to see which one looks 'best'.  Looking good is determined by
having few segments, being short, and not having sharp u-turns, in a fairly
arbitrary weighting.

It doesn't try to avoid any objects, not even the ones being connected to.
The necessary information for making an avoiding autorouter is there, but
it's just a lot more difficult.

If the user moves any of the segments of a zig-zag line, rather than its
endpoints, autorouting is turned off for that line.  It can be turned on
again in the objects menu.

-Lars

-- 
Lars Clausen (http://shasta.cs.uiuc.edu/~lrclause)| HÃrdgrim of Numenor
"I do not agree with a word that you say, but I   |----------------------------
will defend to the death your right to say it."   | Where are we going, and
    --Evelyn Beatrice Hall paraphrasing Voltaire  | what's with the handbasket?