Re: cannot cut and paste from dia to openoffice

[Alan Horkan <horkana maths tcd ie>]

On Mon, 29 Nov 2004, Matthew Wicks wrote:

> Date: Mon, 29 Nov 2004 17:29:42 +0400
> From: Matthew Wicks <matthew wicks transcomsoft com>
> Reply-To: discussions about usage and development of dia
>     <dia-list gnome org>
> To: dia-list gnome org
> Subject: cannot cut and paste from dia to openoffice
>
> I want to change from Visio to Dia, however I cannot cut-and-paste from
> Dia to OpenOffice.
> Somehow when I copy in Dia (on Linux) the clipboard doesnt get the
> content.  I can paste within Dia, but when I go to OpenOffice and paste
> the content isnt there.  Does anyone know how to fix this?  I am using
> Dia on Mandrake 10 CE

As far as I remember this is not yet possible.  I'm not sure Dia can cut
and paste to other applications at all, I think it might only be able to
paste between Dia documents.
If you are a programmer then we would very much appreciate your help to
improve the clipboard support in Dia, and even if you are not a programmer
we appreciate any help you can give with translations, documentation,
adding new shapes or anything else you can think of.

As a workaround you could try Exporting to PNG and inserting that into
your OpenOffice.org Documents (it is not great but it is a start).
There may be other formats that OpenOffice.org understands such as EPS (i
hope, but I haven't checked) but PNG is the most straighforward.

Dia can export to SVG but OpenOffice cannot import SVG yet but there is
some very promising work underway at the moment.
http://www.openoffice.org/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=2497

DXF (AutoCAD Drawing Exchange format) might be worth trying too (unlike
PNG it is at least a vector format so it is likely that more information
will be preserved) although there are some unresolved issues with Dia
OpenOffice and DXF [1].

I have looked through bugzilla (the bug tracking system we share) but I do
not see any bug reports relating specifically to cut and paste from Dia to
OpenOffice.  It might be a good idea to file a bug report to remind us
to try and improve cut and paste support.

Thanks for using Dia.

Sincerely

Alan Horkan

Abiword is Awesome http://abisource.com
Inkscape, Draw Freely  http://inkscape.org

[1] http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=145576