Re: Lots of problems! Hangs, crashes, hair loss

[Steffen Macke <sdteffen web de>]

Hi,

> 1. I just installed the Windows version (0.94) from dia-installer.sf.net
> onto my XP box, and I see a console window with 'I/O warning : failed to
> load external entity "NULL"'. Is there a way to get rid of the console,
> or did it just appear because of the warning? What's up with the warning?

Yes, there is a way to get rid of those warning messages. Have a look at bug 
#150777 - it contains a patch to silence Dia for Windows.

http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=150777

In addition, you can run dia like this to silence it:

dia >nul: 2>nul:

> 3. When I drag an arced arrow around, it sometimes leaves some sort of
> artifact where the arrow head was originally positioned. The only way I
> know of to get rid of it is by dragging some other object over the
> artifact.

Did you try View -> Redraw ?

> Well, that's it (for now). I know that's a lot, but hey - I did take the
> time to write this, and I'm a big fan of (using) OSS in general, so I'd
> love to see this product become better. I'd very much appreciate answers
> to any of these questions, and I also hope my feedback aids Dia's
> development. Thanks in advance.

Thanks for your feedback - you really took some time to write down all these 
things. As dia is Open Source, you can improve (at least) the documentation
in such a way that other users have less problems getting started with the 
software. Whether dia is beta software, you should decide on your own.
For me the most annoying thing for dia on Windows is the printing problem 
documented in bug #85831. But different people are doing different things 
with dia and there might be bugs that prevent you from using it productively.

Note that dia on Linux might be more stable.

Regards,

Steffen