bugs in Dia for Windows

["Paul Balyoz" <paulio10 gmail com>]

I have been looking for a good replacement for Visio for Windows, and stumbled upon Dia.  Dia looked very promising, but has way too many bugs at this time.  I don't have time to type them all into Bugzilla, but I didn't want to move on without at least saying something to the developers.  Here are a few notes I made while using Dia during the past 2 days.  This is for the latest stable release, splash screen says version 0.95-1.

 

* font size defaults to humongous drawing size with teeny paper on the screen, for the default of zoom=100%.  The percent is totally wrong, 285% is closer to 1:1 what you see on the screen, versus actual paper size.
 

* there aren't enough features when you ctrl-click or shift-click, or combinations of those.  Let me select multiple boxes to make a properties-change to, by shift-click/ctrl-click.
 

* CTRL-Y should do "again" operation.  In other words, repeat the last operation on the currently selected items.
   i.e. when resizing font of a text area, I want to resize ALL of them, one at a time, by selecting the next one and hitting ^Y.
 

* Font size makes no sense: what is "0.80"?  It's a giant font.  0.20 is a teeny tiny font, about 1/10th the size of 0.80.
 

* properties of an item need more features, like edit-box for the text inside it (where you can range select or shift-drag the text).
 

* Please enable printing of "only page 1", or "pages 2-3", that sort of feature.  It's disabled on Windows.
 

* need icon binding for .dia files in windows (windows just uses the generic unknown file type icon today).
 

* holding ctrl, or shift, or alt and dragging the end of a line does not snap it to its own vert/horiz alignment, or to any grid lines, that I could see.
 

* Dia opens in weird size window, regardless of size of diagram or size of screen.  If you resize it and quit, it doesn't save the window size, so you get the weird size everytime you open the file.
 

* You can't select text in an editable text area (standalone text, or text in a box); therefore you cannot replace a word or sentence, you have to
   mouse around and backspace to erase a part and retype it.  This means you also can't copy text to another place.
 

* No way to change font size/style for a portion of text - like, I cannot make a box with a big-point bold word first, then smaller italic words below it.
 

* there's a bug where part of the text in a box is obviously one font size and part is another, but there's no way to fix it.  I think it's screen bug only, printing the diagram resulted in all same size font as expected.
 

* selection-rectangle sometimes seems to select objects that it merely touches (not completely engulfing); however, if "not enough" of the object was touched, it is not selected.
   I can't predict how much of an object to touch to make it select the object every time.
 

* Properties dialog: pressing ENTER does not dismiss the box by clicking the OK button, even though OK is colored like it is the default button.
 

* No way to tell the flowchart square box that its inner text should be vertical justified "top". It's always center-justified, vertically.
 

* If you have dual windows such that your secondary screen is to the side of your primary one but up "higher" 20 to 40 pixels, then Dia opens its main window up too high so you can't see the top part of it, and you can't drag it, get to any menus, or dismiss it!  90% of Dia's functionality is now broken, from my point of view.

 

* Default margins of 2+ inches on each side is way way too large; should default to about .5 inches (1.2 cm) or so, for drawing applications.
 

I hope some/all of this was useful to the developers.  I think Dia has a good future, after these kinds of issues are resolved.  I will visit Dia again in another year or so.

 

Keep up the good work.

 

-- paul